Cogs & Machines

THE TWENTY-FIFTH HOUR (404 pp.)--C. Virgil Gheorghiu, translated by Rita Eldon--Knopf ($3.50).

On a mild evening in Paris last spring, the gaily lighted Tuileries Gardens were the scene of a lively kermesse. It was a county fair, Paris style, with chorus girls prancing on an open-air platform while, at garishly decorated stands, French stage and screen stars whooped it up for French products. In all the buzzing, crowded area there was but one solemn touch. A long, patient line had formed before a plain board platform. On it sat a slender, spectacled novelist rapidly autographing stacks of his latest book. They were selling as fast as he could write his name in a large clear hand: C. Virgil Gheorghiu. Within a couple of hours he had sold close to 1,000 copies of The Twenty-Fifth Hour.

This concentration-camp novel by an expatriate Rumanian has outsold (175,000 copies) every other book of fiction published in France since the war. Already translated into 14 languages, its total sales are close to the million mork. Hundreds of reviews and articles, mostly respectful, have been written about the book and it has been the subject of scores of sermons. Read with European eyes, it is not hard to see why: 1) its painful, powerful picture of concentration-camp barbarism records a horror intimately known to millions; 2) its villain is, conveniently, neither Fascism nor Communism but a machine age which has dried up love and compassion, and 3) the U.S. is presented as a rich, prodigal but heartless partner of the totalitarian in the diabolical job of crushing the individual.

Helpless Heroes. Gheorghiu has two heroes, both Rumanians, neither of them guilty of any crime. Johann is a naive young farmhand who is sent to a labor camp by a police official who covets his wife. Traian is a famous novelist and minor diplomat whose first internment comes when the Yugoslavs pick him up as an enemy alien. Once imprisoned, each begins a pointless odyssey of torture and despair that ends with Traian's death in a camp and Johann's enlistment (to escape another round of internments) in the army of "the West" at the start of World War III.

It is the innocent helplessness of its heroes that gives The Twenty-Fifth Hour its heavy coating of irony. Men, Gheorghiu is saying, no longer think in terms of individuals or their happiness. Human life has ceased to mean anything except as a cog in some machine or pattern. Production, material results, categories, statistics--these are all that count. The criminals are not so much the Nazis and the Communists as the big-machine boys everywhere. And of all the nations in the world, says Gheorghiu, it is the U.S. that most fervently worships the twin cults of bigness and the machine. Author Gheorghiu (who steadfastly refuses to visit the U.S.) offers his novelist's proof: his heroes, sure they can count on justice from the Americans, get a heartless shake in U.S. Army P.W. camps.

Choice in Despair. Despite its European popularity, The Twenty-Fifth Hour is no literary masterpiece. Its plot is heavily propped with coincidence, the characters are undeveloped and its message is spelled out with "petitions" that bring the story to repeated full stops. Gheorghiu's villain, machine-age power, is neither an original nor a persuasive one. What gives the book its impact is its assembly of evidence of man's inhumanity to man, by no means peculiar to the machine age.

Gheorghiu wrote his novel in the years 1946-48, and since then a lot of water has run under the bridges of the Danube and the Seine. The Twenty-Fifth Hour catches the despair of many a European in the aftermath of World War II, amid the shards of a broken Europe. By so doing, it has unquestionably won itself a place in the literary history of the times. But like many another European, including Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, Author Gheorghiu now admits that even despair is not without its choices. A fortnight ago, living and writing in a Europe that has ceased to be a concentration camp, he told an American correspondent: "As a European I cannot accept your civilization, but I pray morning, noon and night that, of the two alternatives facing the world today, yours will triumph."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.