My! My! Mai!

NIGHT GAMES by Mai Zetterling. 181 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

Even in these publishing days when anything go-goes, it is not often that a character from a novel can show up in a photograph on the front of the jacket all splayed out upside down on an opulently embroidered bedspread, wearing one slipper, two fancy garters, and what used to be called a ball gown. Night Games, however, was made as a film before it could be read as a novel, so the movie, starring Ingrid Thulin, provided the dust-jacket come-on. The rest of the come-on is Mai Zetterling, a talented and glamorous 41-year-old Swedish actress who wrote the book and directed the film. A screening of it was banned for public exhibition at the Venice Film Festival by the Italians, who tend to love their mothers--though not quite in the way the central character of Night Games loves his mother. It may well have shocked them (TIME, Sept. 16).

Little Jan, the narrator, tells us about life even before he was actually born (he has a memory longer than most people's), and it was wonderful there inside. Later, he doesn't think so much of Mom: "She was a portentous tart with promiscuous tastes, a sensual temple-cat used to visiting sepulchral chambers in the dead of night." He dreams at night and has hallucinations by day that mother is a "sphinx, near Thebes, on a bald and spiky mountain ... a hermaphrodite in the guise of an animal." In fact, Mother is pretty smelly or, as the book prefers, "odorous."

Will little Oedipus escape from his complex? The answer is a real skirt-hanger, suggesting every known perversion, until the happy ending when boy rinds a girl like Mom. The Cocteau-film atmosphere of high camp is sustained by skilled faux-simple prose, which at times evokes Heinrich Mann, at other times less skilled practitioners of psychologically sophisticated pornophilia.

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