Soldiers Cry by Night

In order to appreciate Soldiers Cry by Night, the second volume in Matute's 1960s trilogy about the Spanish Civil War, one must have a taste for the dark politically charged magic realism of some Latin American and Iberian fiction. For those who have already read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Isabel Allende, the interior landscape will seem familiar-perhaps too familiar-by the time they read Matute. The plot of the book revolves around the parallel misfortunes of Manuel and Marta, whose lives are shaped by the drama and trauma of the Civil War. After seeing his mother's humiliations and his adoptive father's bullet-ridden body, Manuel himself is sent to a reformatory and then to a prison for his politics. Marta grows to adolescence in a cheap hotel rife with drugs, crime and prostitution. Their eventual fatal and futile attack on government troops is a hopeless gesture hard to ennoble. But the facts of the plot are less telling than Matute's descriptions of of the world in which they occur: church candles burn ``quietly and passionately like tongues that have been torn out''; a door closes, leaving ``hatred, emptiness and perhaps nausea behind''; and Marta's hands are ``like two frightened and cold animals.'' While the experiences are undoubtedly authentic, based as they are on Matute's own life, as literature, the catalogue of horrors begins to pall. Matute might well be summing up her book when she refers to ``the muffled lament of the world,'' but one is left longing for a redeeming shaft of light in this unremitting gloom. (Jan.)