Spanish Fatalist

THE FINAL HOURS (273 pp.)--Jose Suarez Carreno--Knopf ($3.50).

This book is the second novel to reach the U.S. from Franco Spain in the past three months, and the second to show that thoughtful and compassionate Spanish writers take a grim view of life. In The Hive (TIME, Oct. 5), Camilo Jose Cela highlighted the plight of poverty-stricken Madrilenos. In The Final Hours, Jose Suarez Carreno, 39, portrays the night life of Madrid and offers a world where love is impossible and the human condition hopeless.

Author Suarez' soberly bitter story centers on three characters and is concentrated in one night. Carmen is the young daughter of middle-class parents who has turned prostitute to help pay the bills. Angel Aguado is middleaged, rich and impotent. He seeks "a purity based on frustrated sexuality," and Carmen is the girl he has "elected for his despair." Manolo is a street boy possessed of enormous dignity, though he lives on petty chores and thievery. He is deeply attracted to Carmen, though he has seen her only at a distance.

As the night wears on, Manolo circulates around Madrid, seeing the people of his world: beggars, thieves, drunkards, street vendors. For them the naked problem of life is survival; the eternal lesson: "All of us are like beasts . . . because nobody loves anybody; because between men there isn't anything but deception, hate and suffering." For Carmen and the wealthy Angel Aguado, who spend the night going from bar to bar together, the problem is different. Aguado's case is insoluble, since his sickness consists in being a man incapable of functioning as a man. Unlike Aguado, who torments himself, Carmen has found serenity in "the very hugeness of her misfortune." She is in love with a mystic who has renounced her because he believes that "to be happy now is a tremendous sin," and she knows she will never see him again.

In the final hours of the night, Carmen and Aguado meet Manolo, the street boy, in a bar, and as Manolo looks at the girl, there shines in his eyes "something innocent, hopeless and impossible." Aguado takes them for a drive in his car. In the sierra above Madrid, he smashes the car against the rock wall of the mountain and kills Carmen and himself. As he dies, he thinks, "Everything is useless, absolutely everything in this world." Manolo survives. He robs Aguado's corpse of 12,000 pesetas and starts back toward Madrid on foot, thinking, "I have to live."

Author Suarez' pessimistic fatalism is not calculated to win him wide readership in the U.S., although in Spain he has reaped a harvest of literary honors. He has won the Adonais Prize with a volume of poems, the Lope de Vega Prize with a play, and the Nadal Prize with The Final Hours, his first novel. U.S. readers will not have to share Prizewinner Suarez' gloomy attitude to respect his accomplishments as a novelist.

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