Crisis in the Life of an Old Actor : LAST CALL <i> by Harry Mulisch; translated by Adrienne Dixon (Viking: $19.95; 288 pp.) </i>

The house of translation has many rooms. Some are large, like French; others small. How fortunate when the door of a smaller room--here the Dutch--opens and a work of art emerges.

If English were Harry Mulish’s native language, he would need no introduction. His reputation would be as established as the quality of his writing and the subtlety of his plots; however, only in 1985, with the publication of “The Assault,” were American readers given their first opportunity to read this exceptional novelist.

Now with “Last Call,” Mulisch again offers us a remarkable work. A rigorously condensed tale, this novel is like an onion being peeled away by the narrator’s hands, until nothing is left--then the peeling continues, undoing the very fabric of nothing itself.

Translation is like reaching into a stream to retrieve a bright-colored fish and instead holding up a gray stone. The operation of lifting living language out of its habitat petrifies words, no matter how skillful the translation.

A critic must remember that the language used to translate a novel is closer to this side of experience, reading, than the other, writing. In the case of “Last Call,” Adrienne Dixon has worked hard to preserve the linguistic integrity of Mulisch’s brilliant tour de force.

The protagonist, Uli Bouwmeester, 78, was an unsuccessful actor in his youth. During World War II, he entertained Dutch SS soldiers and was ostracized by the theatrical community after the war.

Now widowed and living with a sister in the Dutch polder, that blank landscape seized from the sea, Uli exists in an atmosphere that recalls Beckett or Pinter--two souls waiting for death in a cold house filled with nothing but recrimination, remorse and brittle memories.

Uli’s life is a set stripped to the bone.

Suddenly comes a call to enter into a different dramatic universe, one much closer to Pirandello. Uli is visited by two strangers who offer him the lead in a new play. With his last role, Uli realizes that he can transform a lifetime of small parts into an oeuvre .

Soon Uli senses that the role for which he has been chosen reverberates with louder and louder echoes from his own past. The play is that most dangerous of devices--a dramatic Ouroboros--a play within a play within a play. Uli is to portray the early 20th-Century Dutch actor Pierre de Vries, giving his farewell performance in “The Tempest,” itself a play effacing the difference between reality and illusion. There is linkage not only from Uli to Pierre, but from them to Prospero as well.

The meshing of the plays with Uli’s life forces dark secrets from his past. In playing another, Uli is truly revealing himself. As he enters into his role, the hidden parts of his life emerge--and we see a human iceberg rising before us.

Moving closer and closer to his last call, Uli believes that he will soon appear on the stage as though before the extended audience of his life and at last receive the critical vindication he deserves--as person and actor.

Alas, waiting in the wings is reality, which through three different tragic encounters, usurps Uli’s hopes and replaces them with an awareness that the final curtain is doming down before it had a chance to go up.

A stunning remark is made by the play’s director (himself a character in the narrator’s mind--again, a role created by Mulisch):

”. . . An actor never crawls into the skin of a character. That is an old misconception. The character must crawl into his skin. As an actor you do not become another person, the other person becomes you.”

The reader of “Last Call” finds himself a telescopic audience--viewing simultaneous performances of Uli’s life, memories and relieved past, mixed with that of De Vries’ role and Prospero’s magical part.

“Last Call” is not the sort of book one can put down to later pick up--without feeling confused, much as the protagonist does, riddled with the question: Not, where am I? But who?

This labyrinth of a novel offers only the frayed string of a narrative to help the reader find his way. If there is an Ariadne, it is Mulisch himself--removed, waiting for the reader to emerge from his a-maze-ing novel with a new awareness of role, character, personality and part. These terms of the theater and psychology become so thoroughly blended that we do not know how to answer Yeats’ haunting question: “Are we anything more than the masks that we wear?”

In Zen gardens--no matter where one sits in relation to the stones--one is always missing. Move as one will, a stone remains unseen.

The whole is forever beyond our grasp.

Uli’s life seen through the magnificent rehearsal of “Last Call” is an extraordinary attempt to locate the missing stone . . . or is it soul?