In the Palace of the Movie King

The author of Mysteries of Motion offers in her new novel a ponderous study of what it means to be a dissident. Internationally known film director Paul Gonchev grew up in Japan, the son of Russian parents. Hired by the Albanian government, he spends five years producing travelogues of foreign cities--filmed in Albania on sets built locally based on the information in Gonchev's voluminous archives. His Yugoslavian wife arranges for the director to be snatched against his will and taken to America, where he discovers that the trauma of his kidnapping has rendered him unable to speak any language but Japanese. With the help of a translator, he ekes out a living for a time on the lecture circuit, but the life of a professional dissident doesn't appeal to him, and he pines for his wife, trapped in Albania. Calisher writes expertly about the dissident experience, and her prose, as usual, is lovely. The book lacks energy, however, and although it is temporarily galvanized by the change of setting to the U.S. and the comic intricacies of Gonchev's language problem, these scenes do not compensate for a generally listless atmosphere. (Jan.)