BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : An Abstract History of an Era and a Cracking Civilization : A DIFFERENT SEA <i> by Claudio Magris</i> , HarperCollins, $20, 104 pages

Early in the century, Enrico spends a dreaming youth near Trieste, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. With his dreams dried up and turned brittle, he spends his old age in the same region, divided since 1945 between Italy and Yugoslavia. For 12 years in between, he herds horses and cattle in Patagonia.

“There is not much to say about Patagonia,” begins the middle section of “A Different Sea.” So, we are warned. And, we are deceived. This tiny novel, barely 100 pages, is nevertheless a history of an era and a fragmenting civilization. Equally misleading are its shifty, allusive abstractions: Seemingly, they refuse to yield anything up but when we are finished someone has left a gold ring in our pocket.

“Not much to say” was just what Enrico was looking for. He is Claudio Magris’ passive emblem for a corner of Europe where German, Italian and Slav cultures lie in mutual uneasy suspension, ready to be decanted into turmoil by the ferocious polarities of the 20th Century. The Great Powers would shout their way into World War I; later Hitler and Stalin would shout themselves back and forth across Europe and, after these voices died, a whole strident chorus of nationalism would burst out.

Magris, a Triestine of Italian and Slavic descent, is the author of “Danube,” a haunting and magisterial study of the swirl of Eastern, Central and Western European currents through the vast Habsburg territories. If the British Empire was assembled absent-mindedly and governed purposefully, for Austro-Hungary--descended from the Holy Roman Empire, never a nation and always a tangle of nationalities--it was the other way around.

Magris does not romanticize its stultifying lethargy and rigidity; he does point out that a great many irreconcilable cultural values managed to coexist without having to be reconciled. Perhaps it was an alternative to the clarifying zealotries--Eternal France, the Thousand-Year Reich, Pax Britannicus, Allies vs. Axis, East vs. West, Croat vs. Serb--that have clarified so much oblivion.

Perhaps not. The literature of Habsburg Europe has, as themes, futility, powerlessness, and the glimpse of a good that will never be achieved. There is Kafka. There are also the Austrian Robert Musil and the Triestine Ignazio Silone. And if Magris does not equal these two, his Enrico is a winning footnote to Musil’s man without qualities and Silone’s Zeno.

Enrico is one of three students who spend their time feverishly discussing philosophy and literature in a garret in Gorizia, near Trieste. They take breaks to go down to the lovely Istrian coast and frolic with three young women: Fulvia, Argira and Paula or, as they jointly sign themselves, Fulviargiaula. They all live by the light of their leader, Carlo. He is at work on a masterpiece of European thought--Magris’ irony distills gradually as we go along--entitled “Persuasion and Rhetoric.”

Carlo, “the Buddha of the Western World,” espouses “persuasion”; a renunciation of desire and ambition in order to live in the present without designs for the future. Those who stand for “rhetoric,” on the other hand, are just the opposite: It is they who have caused wars, insurrections and human misery over the ages. “Every wish destroys true existence,” is Carlo’s creed.

If Magris has “rhetoric” stand for the catastrophes of the West, he quietly undermines--as Musil and Silone did--the futility of those who seek to reject it. Aflame with quietist doctrine, Enrico takes it to an extreme. “Where is it that nothing happens?” he wonders. His 12 years in Patagonia are a deliberate nothing; so much so that the book’s middle portion becomes a trial for the reader. To Carlo, though, his friend is a shining example. “Enrico does not waste his life by trying to seize it,” he writes, “nor does he destroy his shadow by turning around to look at it.”

Magris’ narration is a series of angled fun house mirrors, so that events jump from one corner to the other or vanish at the bottom and reappear at the top. Enrico shoots a Patagonian duck. In the next sentence Carlo shoots himself; so much for quietist philosophy. Enrico gets the news a year later and returns to the village in Istria where they all once summered.

The book’s abstractions give way to a recital--wonderfully fast but wonderfully particular--of the rest of Enrico’s life and times. Fascism, the German occupation, Tito’s takeover of Istria and the detente of the ‘60s flash by; 50 years in 50 pages. Enrico’s quietism descends from a grand idea to a series of crotchets. With odd philosophic innocence and considerable comedy, he becomes a quarrelsome recluse, unable to respond to those who love him. His only scrap of loftiness are the hours he spends sitting and gazing at the sea. Magris has draped his character in the futility of a civilization overpowered by history, but he allows the drapery a certain winning flair.