Book Review : An Elephantine Plot, Full of Sound, Fury, Significance

Rumors of an Elephant by Alain Gerber, translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt (Mercury House: $17.95; 325 pp.)

The leisurely, old-fashioned novel can pause and ramble as much as it wants, and if it’s good enough, the reader is perfectly happy to go with it or wait for it to come back, and maybe do a little shopping or vacuuming in the meantime.

A parable, on the other hand, is pretty much all business. Textured and resonant as the best ones may be, they are essentially single-purpose; and when they have accomplished the purpose, they stop. They are kamikaze, not airline, pilots. You don’t think of kamikaze pilots taking weekends off, or summer holidays, or hanging around for a few beers after work.

Alain Gerber’s “Rumors of an Elephant” is a parable that will neither keep its mind on its business, nor leave when finished. Having made its point--in the first hundred pages or so--it stays around--another 200 pages or so--to chortle and admire itself.

Passions and Atrocities

Gerber invents a town in an imaginary Eastern European country that seems roughly designed to be Poland. It is the setting for a fantasy that seeks to retell the passions and atrocities of racism, nationalism, ideology and plain human meanness in the successive devastations of Nazism, World War II and the Communist new order.

It all begins in the household of the impassioned local kitchen--visionary, Ardamet Naftali. This rotund, hysterical and incompetent person is the patriarch and prophet of his small Jewish family, consisting of a shadowy wife, an active and maladroit son, Yagel, a stolid daughter, Anha, and the younger son, Vimlo. Vimlo, who would like to be ordinary, is the uneasy victim of his father’s certainty that he is the family’s chosen agent of deliverance.

An Unlikely Culprit

Vimlo is given a hawthorn tree to cultivate in the tiny Naftali backyard. It is the sign of salvation. When a large dog bounds in and smashes it, all Vimlo can think of to explain the devastation is that the culprit was a stray elephant.

Unfortunately, Ardamet believes him. Furthermore, he insists that he can see the elephant. So does the rest of the family. So do the neighbors. The elephant--soon named Nathanael--causes traffic jams in the town’s main street. He follows Vimlo to school where the besotted teacher and principal revise the curriculum so that the entire course of study is dedicated to elephants.

The town goes elephant-mad. It is no use for Vimlo to protest that the animal doesn’t exist; he is regarded, as the elephant’s master, as someone supremely blessed. People besiege him with presents and awe.

Eventually, an anti-elephant faction makes itself felt. They are the local Brownshirts, the Fascists. They deny the elephant not from conviction but because the first people to believe in it were the town’s Jews. Later, when the Jews begin to doubt, the Brownshirts reverse field and take up elephant worship. Any program will do for a pogrom.

The Elephant Question

Meanwhile, the nation’s politics is ravaged by the elephant question. There are riots and newspaper wars. Photographs are published of the spot where Nathanael is supposedly standing. Those who deny the elephant see only an empty square in the picture. Those who affirm it see an elephant.

Having got this far, Gerber’s tale sticks fast. The elephant question more or less drops out of sight. There are long accounts of a diversity of things: the misadventures of Vimlo’s brother, Vimlo’s infatuation for an older woman and his susceptibility to a young girl, a feud between the school’s principal and a teacher, the construction of an artificial elephant, a boxing match and so on. They do not contribute much to the parable, and they are not very interesting in themselves. Gerber’s book, highly successful in his native France, is written in a kind of perpetual cacophony. There are extremes of slapstick humor, passions that flare up at a moment’s notice, and extravagant schemes, errands and quarrels of all kinds. The result is neither literary nor intellectual excitement, but a wrought-up effort to suggest excitement by way of furious activity.