THE TALLEST LIAR

The tallest liar is Kerl von Snarl a/k/a Curly Snarl the eight-foot-six Harlem Globetrotter in Egypt a/k/a Toratora the 500-pound sumo wrestler in Japan. This teenage athlete and occasional murderer narrates his picaresque wanderings from Harlem's Ben Franklin High School to a desolate Aegean island with adventures en route in a Canadian lumber camp, a sorceress' hut in Mozambique, and prisons from Pretoria to Cyprus. By bizarre heritage an albino Negro Aryan Nazi Jew, he becomes everybody's scapegoat--target of one raggedy bunch of sharpers and sadists after another in a round-the-world gallery of rogues. Curly maintains that he reports only ""facts,"" but even in these days of Idi Amin et al., Sulzberger's straight-on satire is unmistakably just that--mighty heavy-handed, of course, with point and humor flagging now and again, but potent on South African territory and scathingly effective in spots all over the globe. Zero for subtlety; in the high 80's for topical zap.