New York Times Book Review

Iron Drizzle(December 13, 1998)By James Saynor

COUNTRY OF MEMORY By K. C. Frederick.240 pp. Sag Harbor, N.Y.:The Permanent Press. $24.

Americans often have an image of Eastern Europe that's not necessarily appreciated by Eastern Europeans. From across the Atlantic, the region is seen as unstable and locked in the past, consumed by ancient fears, sutured together by superstition. Repression and understatement are the order of the day. Then there's the weather -- frequently chilly and gray, epitomized by that most deadly of meteorological states, ''drizzle.''

There's so much grayness, cold and drizzle in ''Country of Memory,'' a novel set in Eastern Europe by the American writer K. C. Frederick, that the merest ribbon of blue in the sky causes people to shuffle together and gaze upward in wonder. Such moments of community are rare in this story, which mainly focuses on dread, dislocation and runny noses. It's almost a pastiche of the 20th-century Eastern European novel -- a digest of quiet desperation, mining a vein of literary styles from Kafka to Kundera.

But Frederick seems aware that he's writing from without rather than within and that his tale is something of a conceit, even a backhanded homage to a cheerless tradition. He carries it off with surprising esprit.

The story is told mostly from the viewpoint of Petir, a needy fellow trapped in a ''circle of solitariness,'' who works as a petty bureaucrat in the vast Pyramid Combine, a state-led bank in an unspecified fictional country. While the malign Government grapples with ''unsettlement in the east'' and ''rebellion in the southern provinces,'' Petir's office thwarts legitimate insurance claims against the Combine -- like that of a man called Pund, who lost a leg in a work accident. Pund is convinced that Petir is the desk drone who deep-sixed his payout. Armed with a hammer, he is intent on revenge.

Petir must also cope with the oblique demands of two women. His ex-wife, Marit, is a kleptomaniac librarian with a girlfriend caught up in student protests. And Lera, his (eventual) lover, is an enigmatic femme fatale who claims to be dodging both gangsters and the secret police. She's full of windy remarks: ''All of us are searching, and we're searching for different things''; ''We can't be responsible for other people's illusions. . . . Only for our own.''

Marit and Lera prove unlikely but effective therapists for Petir, helping to soothe his biggest hang-up -- his memory of the deaths of his mother, father and grandmother in a huge inferno, set by his mother, when he was a child. Now all he has to deal with is Pund. When his wild-eyed nemesis finally catches up with Petir, it's almost an epiphany: ''Never in his life had he felt so transcendently content.''

Frederick is a fitful storyteller; the narrative pressure of his novel comes and goes in spurts, like water in an Eastern European plumbing system. Characters endlessly roam the streets, their minds looping between horrid childhood memories of impaled goats and thoughts of their own desolation. They're ''stultified by self-observation,'' to borrow a phrase once used by the English novelist Angus Wilson to describe some of his own characters. As a result, the novel's angst can feel stapled on.

But often there's more life in Frederick's writing than there is in his characters -- when, for example, Petir's face is described as ''a blackboard from which some terribly urgent message had been erased'' or a truck whistles by on the highway like ''an unmoored planet hurtling through space.'' And the narrative is seasoned with witty mock-European folklore -- the saga of a disabled botanist whose heart ends up in the pillar of a cathedral; the myth of ''the tinker of Beldagg,'' a goblin who can snatch your soul if you utter a particular word.

For all that the novel is about a man tiptoeing around the edge of a nervous breakdown, it is also about relishing this condition in a giddy kind of way. ''Country of Memory'' has an odd, depressive exuberance. It amounts to Old World gloom described with irrepressible New World bounce.