Abuses of Affluence

THE EXTREME OCCIDENT by Petru Dumitriu. 378 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $6.95.

"I'm against walls," says Rumania's Petru Dumitriu, who proved his point in 1960 by leaping through the Iron Curtain to settle in the West. What Dumitriu left behind in Bucharest was a rising career as the Communist Party's most applauded novelist, a ranking position as editor of Rumania's most important literary magazine and director of the State Publishing House. What he brought with him was an analytical eye and an inkwell full of ideals.

In Incognito (TIME, Jan. 1, 1965), he combined these assets to excoriate the abuses of power in police-state Rumania, providing in the biography of his hero a large-scale map of all the circles of Iron Curtain hell. In this nov el, he attacks the abuses of affluence in the West. The book is less successful than Incognito, partly because Dumitriu's allegiances are not involved and he thus writes as a bemused outsider, and partly because his experience with Westerners seems limited to the grand and the grotesque.

Madness is really what the book is all about: the madness that French Poet Stephane Mallarme called "the extreme Occident of desires," and that is merely the mask for a ravening death wish. The setting is a nameless, flourishing north European port. The narrator is a

Rumanian refugee whose history parallels Dumitriu's own and who works as public relations officer for a huge shipbuilding corporation. Among the people he encounters: Annerose, a muddled, blue-eyed Venus who has deserted a wealthy husband, set herself up as a fashionable couturiere, and now longs for a "total commitment"--to a person, to a cause, to anything at all; Axel, a dazzling, dispassionate mystic of the absurd who has resigned his university lectureship to work in a hospital ward for thalidomide babies and preach a gospel of gratuitous, existential love, which Annerose finds appealing but scarcely persuasive; Octavio, a muscular young industrialist who believes in exactly nothing and who finally proposes to Annerose a commitment she finds compelling. "What else does beauty need," he asks, "but the chance to be destroyed?" What, indeed? In a scene involving some of the sickest psychology since Sade, she invites him to mutilate her breasts with a carving knife.

Unchecked desire, suggests Dumitriu, spirals darkly downward into chaos, madness or murder, and he illuminates the descent with passages of coruscating prose. He clearly intends his book to be an acid analysis of decline in the West, but U.S. readers will more likely find it just another well-wrought urn in the fashionable temple of despair.

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