Books: The Lasf Knight

THE HUSSAR (343 pp.)—Gregor von Rezzori—Harcourf, Brace ($4.95).

In the town of Tchernopol, "to be mean is no crime." The people of Tchernopol laugh when a coachman slashes at a blind man for getting in the way of a carriage. They laugh when a drunk sings obscene songs or when a dog is run over.

Tchernopol is in southeastern Europe, possibly in Rumania, where 46-year-old Author von Rezzori was born. But the city of cruel laughter is also Everyplace, an allegorical setting for a philosophical novel on the nature of reality.

The town and its people are seen through the eyes of a nameless narrator recollecting his childhood. The purpose is not nostalgia but magic: "Our childhood is our myth, the legend of times when we stole from the gods insight into the substance of things." The substance of things in Tchernopol has a kind of evil fairytale logic: some trifling incident fuses a pogrom, and a kindly Jewish doctor is bloodily beaten and his precious scientific work destroyed; the town's notorious nymphomaniac, a woman with a "topaz gaze," ends up in the arms of a foaming madman at the local insane asylum. These episodes occur rather like unrelated chemical experiments, but what they prove is akin to Shakespeare's "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/ They kill us for their sport."

Neither wanton boys nor gods 'kill Major Nicholas Tildy, the hussar of the title and chief symbolic figure of the novel. When narrator first sees Tildy on horseback, he is a blaze of blue and gold, and his imperious shako seems like the headgear of "the last knight." For the boy it is a moment of epiphany combining ideas of beauty, honor, perfection and the Holy Grail. But the hussar is not liked by the townspeople, for his "flawlessness" makes other men feel like curs. After a fight with his commanding general, Tildy is clapped into the insane asylum "for observation." This happens on page 125, and the rest of the novel is devoted to other stories that deviously illuminate Tildy's down fall. The gist of it is that the hussar tilted with the essence of life and lost.

Chaos is at the heart of things, argues Author von Rezzori, and Tildy-like at tempts to impose forms and codes are noble but doomed. The Hussar is not al ways fictionally compelling but nearly always intellectually exciting. Author von Rezzori writes with aphoristic flair and a hint of childlike wonder. He has produced a flashing novel of ideas, a species that ranks in rarity with the Tasmanian wolf and the Komodo dragon.