DATE: Sunday, August 24, 1997               TAG: 9708140601

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY ADAM BERNSTEIN 

                                            LENGTH:   63 lines

INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLES THROUGH NAZI EUROPE, UNREQUITED LOVE

BENJAMIN'S CROSSING

JAY PARINI

Henry Holt. 308 pp. $23.

It's between the mind and the body, the temporal and the eternal, the high intellect and the uncritical conformist attitude of mass mentality. In his latest book, Benjamin's Crossing, novelist, poet and biographer Jay Parini plays out these conflicts with confidence and style.

A novel that occurs during the Nazi advance, Benjamin's Crossing is based on the actual flight across Europe of the German-Jewish critic and intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Parini constructed the story with the use of memoirs and biographies of people who knew Benjamin as well as the correspondence of the man himself.

Parini exposes Benjamin, the author of the essay ``The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,'' whose title is more accessible than its prose, as a man who uses his intellect as a shield against life's temporal harshness, injustices and disappointments.

Desire long having left his marriage, the fat, unkempt Benjamin, an obscure newspaper and reference-book contributor, engages in a series of unsatisfying love affairs with women who believe him incapable of passion and who never return his affection.

``Even while sharing his bed,'' Benjamin thinks about one woman, ``she had proved the most difficult text he had ever tried to read, a site of contradictory signs. She demanded his complete attention, like a poem, but she did not reward his attention with a reciprocal gaze.''

Benjamin's great love is literature. To hear others tell it, he lacks the ability to appreciate the humanity within people. He envisions the world as one large idea, rife with smaller ideas. A human being is merely a collection of ideas. The body is a vessel, a thing, an object.

If a person is merely a compilation of ideas and theorems, then Benjamin's mighty, unpublished manuscript, which he takes with him everywhere, is a symbol of his own significance - his best self, his ticket to immortality. But even this text fills him with a grave sense of fraudulence about his accomplishment.

It ``was finally a book of fragments. His life was composed of fragments, quotations from other, better writers. His days were lived between quotation marks, and the high points if his existence merely italicized and familiar phrases.''

Parini imparts Benjamin's character through the effective use of many voices. Each chapter tells his story from a different person's perspective. To name a few, there are Benjamin's friend, the critic Gershom Scholem; Benjamin's mercurial lover Asja Lacis; and an objective narrator.

Time and place - World War II Europe - are significant in unraveling the mystery of Benjamin's world. His book, writes Parini, ``was his private work against fascism'' at a time when the Nazis purged Europe of its intellectuals. He saw himself as the ``defender of Enlightenment.''

Benjamin's actual book, Illuminations, was published in the United States in the late 1960s.

Benjamin's Crossing would paint its eponymous subject as a genius smitten with emotional and intellectual distress. With these ambiguities, the book is a satisfying portrait of a man never quite at home in the world. MEMO: Adam Bernstein is a staff writer.

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