Spies and Surfaces

By Horace Judson

THE SECOND DEATH OF RAMON MERCADER

by JORGE SEMPRUN 377 pages. Grove. $7.95.

Can there be any point to writing a spy thriller in extreme slow motion? That is the sort of paradox that could only attract a French novelist who has also worked in French cinema--a man, in fact, like Jorge Semprun, who was born in Madrid but has lived in France since 1939, where he has won literary prizes and has written screenplays for films including Costa-Gavras' Z.

For 20 years it has been the preoccupation of French novelists of the nouveau roman--Alain Robbe-Grillet, Mark Saporta, et al.73151;to build their fictions exclusively from facts, objects, appearances, surfaces and the impressions of the moment. Even when the method works, the result is long-winded; but it can have the illusionist beauty of pointillism that only makes sense as the onlooker steps back.

Semprun's New Wave spy novel, accordingly, is sometimes hallucinatory, often irritating, always intricate. The opening is a microscopic examination of a scene by a Dutch canal bank. As Semprun's camera slowly pulls back it is Vermeer's View of Delft, hanging on its wall of the Mauritshuis in The Hague where it is being looked at by a man who thinks of himself as a spy, thinks of himself as being shadowed, and who may be a Spaniard, a businessman named Ramon Mercader, which happens also to be one of the names by which history knows a different secret agent--the man who assassinated Leon Trotsky.

None of these things is to be relied on. What is more certain is that this second Mercader's presence in Amsterdam has attracted agents from the CIA (mostly bumblers), from the KGB (more humane and more efficiently murderous), and from East Germany. Mercader appears to work with the Russians-but possibly has become a no-longer-useful and hence disposable double agent for them. Amsterdam is filled with other people who seem to bounce off him at random, including a henpecked French intellectual and an American writer at work on a screenplay about Trotsky. Over the novel hovers a controlling symbol, the reiterated memory of the ten minutes in the sunlit, walled garden in Mexico in 1939 when Trotsky was murdered with an Alpine pick. Ramon Mercader is death-obsessed which gives it its greatest strength. sb Horace Judson

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