BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Dark, Murky Story of Uncertainty and Oppressed Lives : THE BLACK ENVELOPE <i> by Norman Manea</i> ; Translated from the Romanian by Patrick Camiller; Farrar, Straus & Giroux $25, 331 pages

“The Black Envelope” is a madman’s dream truly reported; a ghastly chorus of shattered souls in Romania toward the end of Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule. It was a long rule, a rule that stifled in a peculiar way not quite like that of any other dictatorship. It was a blanket, coarse and heavy; producing, as a heavy blanket will, nightmares in the sleeper, and not permitting him to get up.

Manea, who left Romania in 1986, is a formidable writer. His last book, “Compulsory Happiness” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), was four stories that conveyed in different ways--allegory, satire, fantasy--the dark spiritual depths in which tyrannized people live. The writing moved between levels of the conscious and the unconscious but, as with a partly overcast landscape, recognizable landmarks were spottily visible to mark what was cloud and what was not.

In “The Black Envelope”--there is an envelope but it isn’t black--Manea has attempted something more thoroughgoing but less successful. The clouds of unreason are unbroken and there are no landmarks below. The characters have only vaguely fixed identities; they reappear in different guises, or with different names or even as different characters altogether. Incidents are introduced with apparent arbitrariness; later they may be contradicted. Twice, a scene is set out only to be repeated farther along using many of the same phrases.

The reader loses faith in the book even as a physical object: could the repeats be carelessness at the bindery? He loses faith in the author: Why is he performing such mystification? He loses faith in himself: Is he too thick or careless to discern what is going on?

That, no doubt, is Manea’s intention. He is writing of a Bucharest where a friend is probably a spy (and no less a friend), where every effect has a hidden cause, where people, actions, events are “substitutes”--a recurring phrase--for very different originals. And to make the effect more complete he draws the reader into the same arbitrary uncertainty. He recounts the dreams of a society driven clinically mad by the Pavlovian designs of its ruler. He goes on to propagate the dreams out of the pages like one of those popup books that speak of giants and produce a three-dimensional cardboard specimen.

The unstable center is Tolea, a broken man. Once a charismatic teacher, he lost his job for “moral” reasons; apparently a relationship with one or more of his male students. A mysterious protection--there is no character who may not have secret official links--allows him to work in Bucharest as the multilingual receptionist at a hotel.

Tolea has had a lover, Irina, who works in the Association, a powerful official body closely resembling the Communist Party. He visits Marga, a psychiatrist who acts as a kind of shadowy guru. He rooms in the apartment of Gafton, a journalist, whose youthful fieriness is reduced to writing letters criticizing the elevator service, and to a detailed study of World War II.

Tolea, who spends much of the time supine, receives a letter from his brother in Argentina, who is dying. It demands that he investigate the death, perhaps by suicide, of their father during the war. A philosopher by training and a Jew, he had seen bad times coming and switched to the conceivably less dangerous occupation of wine merchant. Then he began getting threatening letters; the author, it is believed, was a young photographer named Tavi.

Briefly, Tolea rouses himself and, by design, so does the book. There is a lively specificity to the Bucharest he strolls through on his way to the headquarters of the Association, where names and addresses are kept. He hesitates midway, thinking to abandon his mission. Then, “he abandons the abandonment.” He is about to commit “a true event,” and, for a moment, the story grows eventful.

A true event is a dangerous bacillus; the society mobilizes ghostly antibodies to expel it. Before long Tolea is safely back in the world of changing shapes. Caught in an earthquake, he makes passionate love to a stranger who may variously be Irina, an Irishwoman, a ballet dancer named Francesca Pop and, of course, a police spy.

Dr. Marga repeatedly receives him, to confusedly shifting purposes. Tolea visits Tavi’s apartment, only to find a middle-aged woman with a soft voice and a black dog named Tavi. Why the soft voice? why the dog? Why, for that matter, after Tolea is taken away to the mental hospital, does he hold a long discussion with the painter Titian? Why Titian?

Perhaps it is because, as we are told, one of the paintings that Carol II, Romania’s last king, took with him when he was deposed was a Titian. That is not an explanation, though; at most it is a point a little upriver in Manea’s stream of unconsciousness. An admirably turbid and turbulent stream, to be sure, but Manea furnishes no boat; not even a few bits of driftwood to make one.