PARROT’S PERCH by Michel Rio (Harcourt Brace...

PARROT’S PERCH by Michel Rio (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $10.95). Father Joachim, a Latin-American priest, has suffered political torture, being hung upside down in a device called “the parrot’s perch.” Now, at his new home in exile--a rural monastery on the Brittany coast of France--Joachim remains submerged in the horror of the experience, and wrestles with the agony of lost faith and universal doubt. Joachim delivers an opening sermon to the monks and shocks them by reciting a three-page list of Christian martyrs and the method of their torture. Joachim rejects their Catholic creed of Suffering as the route to Redemption. “I don’t believe in original sin,” he announces. “How can one believe in the guilt of amino acids?” Religion itself has become only “moral tales embellished by fear.” For the rest of the novel (88 pages in all), Joachim strolls the grounds of the monastery in a state of rhapsodic despair. He encounters a woman who has heard his sermon, and erupts anew in a “declaration of disbelief” that shatters her tranquillity as well. Joachim returns home for a nap and awakes at dawn with a tentative sensation of hope. “Parrot’s Perch” has been translated from the French, which must have been tricky, to approximate Rio’s dark, precise reasonings and images; quite a banquet of ideas and languages, in which most every morsel is impregnated with symbolism. Joachim himself best describes the tone of this extended monologue: “a dialogue with passion, infinite experience, complete commitment, and raw consciousness.”