Not for Tourists

ORIGINAL SIN (179 pp.)--Giose Rima-nelli--Random House ($2.95).

Few tourists and fewer novelists visit the Molise region, which stretches, a withered Achilles tendon, above the heel of the Italian peninsula. Novelist Giose Rimanelli, who was born in this doomed place, has produced a bitter fictional report centered on a village that hangs like an abandoned bird's nest on a waterless escarpment between the Apennine Mountains and the Adriatic. His story, in translation at least, is as stiff, ill-fitting and yet appropriate as a peasant's wedding suit.

Even water is lacking to these country poor in the bitter postwar days. The old men smoke potato leaves. Food is a crust smeared with tomato pulp or dipped in hot wine. They hang about for days at the edges of fields hoping for jobs. Their priest begs lentils from door to door. On the Feast of St. Francis, the townspeople leave a hoarded egg white and the thistly cardoon as an offering. As Novelist Rimanelli spells it out, America with its fabulous giobbe (jobs) offers the one hope of earthly release from a doom of sweat, petty theft, envy, slander. For peasant poverty here has not made for nobility of soul--these people are tougher than the brass-hearted Normans of De Maupassant. Unlike the Irish who made a myth and a song of economic despair, these Mediterranean realists can only make brutal gestures, and Novelist Rimanelli has told a chronicle of such gestures in terms of the Vietri family.

Nicola's most important asset is a patch of land he can trade for a passage to Canada. He has one nubile daughter named Michela, another one named Sira, who is a mute. On St. Francis' night, when the egg white and the cardoon are on the window sills, a village woman empties a chamber pot on two peasants. This has the odd effect of stirring their passions, and they waylay Michela with rape in mind. The rape is not accomplished, but Michela becomes as mutely mad as her sister; what is more she is really in love with one of the peasants and he with her. Father Nicola renounces the traditional vengeance, but there is more violence, including 'castration and murder, before the survivors take off to the New World.

This gruesome little melodrama could be forgotten had not Novelist Rimanelli, with more sincerity than art. compelled the reader to believe that he too has been one of the hungry Mediterranean aborigines on the harsh hillsides where tourists never go. As a commuter between continents, Rimanelli chose an apt title for his book from a text that he attributes to an 18th century merchant: "These people of the South have upon them the mark of original sin, a curse of Satanas. Whence poverty, invasions, the Bourbons, Jesuits, cholera and all the ills that afflict the spirit and the flesh. And then you ask me: Why do they leave? Are they not content here? I tell you: No. And no government--as distinguished from Christ --can ever redeem them."

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