FICTION

MY FATHER, HIS SON by Reidar Jonsson , translated from the Swedish by Marianne Ruuth (Arcade: $19.95; 256 pp.) . This novel is a sequel to “My Life as a Dog,” which became one of 1985’s most memorable foreign films. Moviegoers will recall that its young hero, Ingemar Johansson, tried to distance himself from his problems--sick mother, absent father, bullying older brother--by identifying with Laika, the dog that orbited the Earth in a Soviet spacecraft.

In “My Father, His Son,” Ingemar has grown up and, like his father, become a merchant sailor. He is 17 years old and having wild adventures with sharks in Australia, thieves in Nigeria, police in South Africa and bordellos on both coasts of the Mediterranean. Thanks to some cinematic (and occasionally confusing) splicing by author Reidar Jonsson, Ingemar is also in his 30s, with a son of his own and a disintegrating marriage, retired from the sea but not from its psychological legacy.

His wife, Louise, calls him a “Concrete Man,” armored against his own feelings, and although Ingemar considers Louise almost a cartoon parody of a feminist, he begins to suspect that she may be right. He recalls his disappointing reunion with his father in an African port: “(The elder Johansson) disappears in a dozen Tuborg beers a day, with about 20 standard phrases keeping all real emotion at bay. . . . I have no way of forcing myself inside.”

What seems to be a rollicking, picaresque novel, comic and gruesome by turns, is actually a sophisticated meditation on how child victims slip seamlessly into being adult victimizers. Jonsson fingers a surprising villain: adventure itself, which hardens and burdens with guilt the men it promises to liberate. “My Father, His Son” reflects a certain male ambivalence: We’re supposed to see through Ingemar’s tall tales--his equivalent of the space dog’s far-off orbit--just as he eventually does, but there’s no denying they’re terrific fun.