BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Meticulous Study of a Complicated Life : FIMA <i> by Amos Oz</i> , <i> translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas De Lange</i> , A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book Harcourt Brace, $22.95, 322 pages

“We’ve had to put up with so much (bull) from the poets, with their Beatrices, their earth mothers, their gazelles, their tigresses, their sea gulls, their swans, and all that nonsense,” says one of the women in Amos Oz’s remarkable new novel, “Fima.” “Let me tell you, being a man strikes me as a thousand times more complicated than that.”

“Fima” is the story of Ephraim Fima, a middle-aged Israeli man whom we first encounter in the grip of a quiet but ominous spiritual crisis. Gently, Oz allows us to see how very complicated his life is.

“What have you accomplished with your life?” he scolds himself. “Will it be of any use . . . that once in Jerusalem there lived a troublesome layabout who got on everybody’s nerves with his petty linguistic corrections? Who fornicated with married women? Who argued with lizards and cockroaches?”

At 54, Fima is a troubled intellectual who has failed at both his career and his marriage. He’s a fat poet with slim volumes (as Dylan Thomas used to say of himself), an idler and an eccentric whose own father calls on him to be “more of a Cossack and less of a shlemazel”--and then secretly slips a crumpled bill in Fima’s pocket so his son won’t walk around penniless.

At times funny and endearing, but more often poignant and even tormenting, “Fima” is a glimpse into the roiling inner world of a dreamer who cannot awaken from his dream.

We watch as Fima caroms helplessly between the fixed points of his otherwise disordered life. He works as a receptionist in a obstetrical clinic, where he attracts the attention of troubled women.

Still, he haunts his former wife and her new husband, and he befriends their young son, Dimi, an albino with whom he shares a slightly mad curiosity about the workings of the cosmos. And, although he scratches out a newspaper article now and then, Fima pays far more attention to his journal of dreams because, we are told, “he found less falsehood in sleeping than in waking.”

As we get to know Fima, as Oz leads us deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of fantasy and pain in which Fima exists, a world of fantastic reveries and bitter revelations, we begin to see that Fima is a visionary, or a nut, or both.

Fima summons up imaginary cabinet meetings and lectures the politicians on how to make peace with the Arabs. When he experiences a mystic incarnation--”something transparent filling the whole universe”--it turns out to be nothing more than snowflakes.

And he engages in an ongoing discourse with a ghostly figure called Yoezer: “A stranger, a . . . man whose parents were not even born yet, the man who would be in this room on a winter’s night a hundred years from now.”

Oz seems to suggest that Fima embodies something ancient and eternal in the human spirit, something that manifests itself with special urgency in that place we still call the Holy Land.

On a walk through Jerusalem, Fima recalls others who wandered the same streets: “Prophets of consolation and wrath . . . world-reforming saviors, impostors, dreamers, priests and hearers of voices, traitors, messiahs. . . .” And, as Oz intends us to understand, Fima is a kind of cracked latter-day prophet of moral doom.

“The city has been entrusted to our stewardship,” Fima rants to himself. “We inflict humiliation, frustration, torture on each other, not out of arrogance but merely from laziness and fear. We pursue good and cause evil. We seek to comfort and instead we wound.”

Oz is among the most accomplished--and, certainly, the most celebrated--of contemporary Israeli novelists. His books travel well, and “Fima” is a good example of how Oz manages to give us a sharp sense of a particular time and place while transcending the here-and-now of contemporary Israeli society. Indeed, Ephraim Fima reminded me of a character out of Isaac Bashevis Singer--and, oddly enough, the aging Cuban musician in “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”

Oz is an activist in the peace movement in Israel, and he has long called for accommodation between Arab and Jew in the Middle East. And Fima is a man haunted by history and afflicted by the suffering he sees around him; at one point, he imagines what it was like for an Arab youth who was killed by a plastic bullet fired by an Israeli soldier.

“Is there a fraction, an atom of time in which illumination arrives?” he asks himself. “The light of the seven heavens? When what has been dim and vague all your life is momentarily opened up before darkness falls? As though all those years you have been looking for a complicated solution to a complicated problem, and in the final moment a simple solution flashes out.”

Alas, no such epiphany awaits Fima. He longs for “one hour of total inner freedom and of feeling at home,” but realizes, in the end, that even 60 minutes of spiritual rest is too much to ask. As “Fima” shows us, real life is a thousand times too complicated for that.