THE RED COCK FLIES TO HEAVEN

In a surprising composite of old Slavic legend and modern surrealism, this young Yugoslavian novelist writes about the good and evil in man--thinly disguised as the story of a few Montenegrin peasants. Muharem, a deformed, thirty-year-old Moslem, owns a cockerel, the symbolic key to the good human heart. Tormented and beaten by his fun-seeking fellows at the wedding of the girl who, he had secretly hoped, was to help him become a man, Muharem loses the cock and the chance to establish his rightful place in the travails of village society. The other characters--Mad Mara, helpless game for the village men, two revelling gravediggers, two salt-of-the-earth vagrants, and Iliya, the old man who secretly fathered and secretly loved Muharem--appear and reappear in a literary collage of contrasting hearts. It is an intricate tale, skillfully woven; but the pervading tone the naive, almost superhuman, humility arouses incredulity and, occasionally, tedium.