BOOK REVIEW FICTION : A Overwrought Ride Into Magical Rhetoric : THE BOOK OF NIGHTS <i> by Sylvie Germain</i> , <i> Translated from French by Christine Donougher</i> ,Verba Mundi/David R. Godine, $22.95, 275 pages

Digging deep into magical realism’s palette and hurling gobs of color and tinsel stars across the page, Sylvie Germain has attempted an epic, more painted than written, of France over 100 years of peace and bloodshed.

“The Book of Nights” runs from before the Franco-Prussian war to the present day. Its mythic protagonist is Victor-Flandrin Peniel, also known as Night-of-gold-Wolf-face, who is a kind of French Paul Bunyan. Where Bunyan logged the countryside, he farms it; instead of a blue ox, he is companioned by four wives (one of whom bleeds blue, in fact), a mysterious boar-woman and many children, variously prosaic and spooky.

Germain’s book is not so much a story as a cycle of recurring images: of destruction and rebuilding, of strange births and uncanny deaths, of odd plantings and bloody harvests.

Her hero represents France in the glory and curse of its history, in its shining moments and dark ones. Such is the apparent intention, although this gives about as much of an idea of “Nights” as to describe a trip solely by its destination.

How is the trip? Larger than life, which may sound good but in this case is not. The life is missing from the largeness. In one of several out-of-the-ordinary births that occur, a wife endures an outsized term of pregnancy--two years while waiting for her husband to come back from the war--and what she finally delivers is a statuette encrusted in salt.

“Nights” is a similarly elaborated and drawn-out conception.

Victor’s father is a bargeman who comes back from the Franco-Prussian war hideously disfigured and with a ruined temper, only to have his wife putrefy and die immediately after the salt-statue birth.

He impregnates a complaisant daughter, who hemorrhages black blood and dies giving birth to the oversized Victor. The father cuts off two of the boy’s fingers so he will never have to go to war; then he drowns. Victor sheds seven tears, which he strings together and carries with him, along with his grandmother’s smile, as he goes off to seek his fortune.

He finds it at a prosperous farm on the German border. He marries the farmer’s daughter and begins a dynasty of blood, dreams and nightmares.

The plot is repeated matings, births and deaths, and their several fantastical circumstances and mythical implications. Twin sons leave their fiancees to go off to World War I. They are caught in an explosion, and one comes back carrying the other’s arm. No one knows which is the survivor, not even the survivor himself. From then on he is known as Two-Brothers. He takes both fiancees as wives and begets a son with one of them. The son has a hump; inside the hump there is a second tiny person.

Victor, by now twice a widower, takes a third wife, who has lost all her hair as the result of a dream and who dies from a second dream. Later he marries a Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe who ends up in a World War II concentration camp. Mating with a wood nymph who emerges from a slain boar, he begets triplets. Two will grow up to become Nazi storm troopers; the third, a blind singer with an unearthly voice.

The Germans invade, burn the farm and kill some of Victor’s children. Victor survives to have a mystical experience of God as an earth spirit. Here is an excerpt:

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He no longer felt rejected by the rivers, the earth, and love, as he had at the beginning of this recent spell in war latitude, but simply deflected to the very far edge of this mysterious and crazy dream of which he had just had an intimation, and which he wanted to waken.

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Apart from the possible misprint (“ from which he wanted to waken”?), it is a sample of the author’s more overwrought passages, vehement and vague at the same time, and of an awkward translation. Germain’s story is all breath and no voice. Its narrative and its characters possess little intrinsic wit or interest; they are simply occasions for the author’s decorative myth-work. Magical realism in decay is magical rhetoric.