FICTION

THE DUST ROADS OF MONFERRATO by Rosetta Loy , translated from the Italian by William Weaver (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 251 pp.) . When the plot of “Les Miserables” required two characters to meet at Waterloo the night after the battle, Victor Hugo backed off and wrote 60 blood-and-thunder pages on the entire campaign. In “The Dust Roads of Monferrato,” one character fights in Napoleon’s army at Marengo in 1800, and his grandson takes part in a naval engagement against Austria in 1866. Rosetta Loy dispenses with each battle in about a half-paragraph. A memorable, poetic half-paragraph, however.

Thus has the 19th-Century family novel evolved from epic to lyric. There are two reasons for this: the dwindling of 20th-Century attention spans and the development of technique. Loy wastes no words in this chronicle of four generations of particulari, or small landowners, in the Piedmont region of Italy. Yet she seems to leave nothing out--neither the great events nor the intimate details: floods, cholera epidemics, festivals, births, funerals, visitations from ancestral ghosts, love frustrated and fulfilled.

Meanwhile, behind the vivid character portraits of farmers and nuns, blacksmiths and beggars, servants and children, a nation is taking shape. In its northern, feminine, peasant way, “Dust Roads” is a worthy complement to “The Leopard,” Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel of Sicilian aristocracy during the same period.

In short, technique serves life. For all its subtlety, “Dust Roads” retains the traditional power of the multigenerational novel: its God’s-eye view of men and women making passionate, unique claims on existence, only to fade away like their predecessors. It’s a story that could go on forever, though Loy logically ends it at the onset of the industrial era, when so many families left the land and the ghosts in the old stone houses no longer knew whom to haunt.