Lament for a Lost Eden

BEYOND THE AEGEAN (260 pp.)--Ilias Venezis--Vanguard ($3.50).

Some novels unwind like a spool of thread, others are woven like a basket. A spool-of-thread novel simply asks to be followed to reveal its meaning. A basket novel, on the other hand, is fashioned to cradle its meaning, and that meaning may be as evanescent as a mood or as intangible as a memory of a bygone time and place. Beyond the Aegean is a basket novel, and its artful strands hold an evocation of pastoral serenity, the life of the Greek community in Asia Minor before the coining of World War I, a conflict that made Turkey Germany's ally and sparked the massacres and mass expulsion of the Greeks in the early 1920s.

Author Venezis, 52, a topflight Greek novelist and playwright, is himself Anatolian-born, and he fled Asia Minor with his family at the age of ten. Hence his novel carries the dual poignance of a forec'osed childhood as well as a lost Eden Beyond the Aegean has no narrative line Author Venezis almost casually tells of a small boy's wonder, an old man's passion tor the land, and a folk wisdom that blends faith with superstition, legend with reality.

A Pantheon of Presences. Of a hot summer's day, Peter, the novel's narrator likes to rest his boyish cheek against the black Anatolian earth and study the ants at their interminable labor, or watch a falcon wheeling lazily in the sky. Back of his grandfather's farm towers a mountain range from which the region takes its name, the Kimindenia. Up in the topmost crags of the Kimindenia lives Peter's private deity, the great eagle, which soars even above pelting storm clouds to seek the sun. To Peter the mountainside is a pantheon of presences, for his mother tells him that every tree has a soul.

Heart and soul of the farm itself is Grandfather Jannako, a rugged patriarch of 70. Each evening grandfather reads the clouds like omens to foretell tomorrow's weather. Then he closes the farm gates praying "for all of us, for the men the trees and the flocks." The hardships of nature are the law of life on the Kimindenia, a life as archaic, simple and untutored as that of the days of Hesiod or Homer. The measured cycle of the seasons plays counterpoint to less stately rhythms of blood. Roving guerrilla bands of smugglers, with their glittering rifles and black fur caps, raid the passing camel caravans and spur their foaming horses into the night. Yet for old Jannako, young Peter and the good people of the Kimindenia the world is rooted in "unalterable peace."

A Sense of Life. A bullet in Sarajevo murders the peace. As World War I breaks in on them, the children weep sensing only that "the song of our childhood was over . . . and so, without knowing it, we were the first to mourn that summer's day of 1914."

In weaving his lament. Author Venezis alternates strands of poetry, myth and nostalgia. A few tough fibers of plot might have held the novel's basket together more firmly. Fortunately, he has avoided stuffing it with sentimental gewgaws, and filled it instead with an abundant sense of life and an unforced sympathy with humanity's lot that carries far beyond the Aegean.

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