BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Multilayered Political Mystery With a Bleak Message : KONFIDENZ <i> by Ariel Dorfman</i> , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $17, 178 pages

From the upside-down foreign title to the ambiguous ending, “Konfidenz” remains a challenge even to a reader familiar with Ariel Dorfman’s highly charged work. An Argentine who immigrated to Chile only to flee that country when Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military junta, Dorfman now lives in North Carolina.

His sophisticated and complex novels and plays are multilayered, but almost all deal with political issues on one level or another. Simmering just beneath the surface, altering and reshaping the identities, nationalities and relationships of his characters, politics also becomes the focus of “Konfidenz,” which begins with the deceptively romantic device of a woman’s arrival in Paris to meet her lover.

Her name is Barbara, which could be Spanish, Italian, English, or almost anything, and she is standing in the doorway of her hotel room when the phone rings. The caller is not her lover Martin, but a man who identifies himself as one of Martin’s friends. Though he merely inquires if the limousine has met her as arranged, the fact that Martin has delegated her welcome to a driver is unsettling in itself. Limousines are not, she says “exactly his style.” The man on the phone seldom finishes his sentences, but instead skillfully inveigles Barbara into finishing them for him, so that she is soon inadvertently revealing bits and pieces of information about herself and Martin.

He tells her to call him Leon, but implies that Leon is not really his name. It is, however, a name that is also virtually generic. There are allusions to her country and his country, though we are left to guess if it’s the same place. The country’s name is not revealed. Neither is the year. Did Barbara arrive by ship, by train, or by air? Is the novel set in the present or in the past? No clues are given. As for Martin, he has apparently summoned Barbara to Paris on “a matter of life or death,” which she interprets as an illness or an accident. When Leon assures her that Martin is in good health and unhurt, Barbara assumes that he is in danger of another sort.

The elliptical telephone conversation will continue for the next nine hours with a few interruptions. From time to time Leon hangs up and promises to call again within an hour. A meal is delivered to Barbara’s room and she’s given time to eat it. There are some brief asides to the reader, though whether these are Barbara’s thoughts, Leon’s, Martin’s, or those of the writer himself is deliberately left unclear. The sense of menace increases with each inconclusive sentence, particularly after Leon admits to having seen Barbara’s photograph and identified her as “the woman of his dreams.”

At this point and for sometime thereafter, it seems only logical to see Barbara and perhaps her lover Martin in the role of victims, threatened by the mysterious but invisible Leon. Led on by the thinly veiled menace in Leon’s voice, the reader willingly fills in the blanks, assisted by Leon’s insidious questions and oblique hints. Disoriented and desperate for signposts, we begin to make up our own. Barbara and Martin are probably from some volatile South or Central American country in the throes of revolution, a place where people can suddenly vanish, a place where “the disappeared” are numbered in the thousands.

Of course, we may be overreacting. It’s possible that Leon is simply attempting to seduce Barbara by telling her that she is the “woman I’ve been dreaming with every night of my life since I was 12.” He insists upon calling her Susanna, and says that she has not only visited him nightly but guided all his decisions and choices in life. Whether this Susanna is a figment of his imagination or not, she soon becomes a central player in the drama. As Leon says, Susanna has waited for him to grow up before incarnating herself as Barbara and appearing to him in the guise of Martin’s lover. Eventually a few terse facts emerge. Barbara is 20 years old and a teacher of photography to 12-year-old boys in her homeland; an age that seems to have a peculiar significance.

Later, Barbara is arrested by police who enter her hotel room and take her away to be interrogated, temporarily deepening the mysteries surrounding the characters. “Konfidenz” will become even more obscure before certain parallels emerge, but when they do, the bleak message of the novel will seem both inevitable and inescapable.