I'm No Truck

``. . . with kids you really have to be careful,'' warns one character in French writer Saumont's first book to be translated into English. What happens when one is not careful is at the core of many of these 16 stories: In ``Walls'', the youngest of four brothers is unhinged by memories of his three older siblings' brutal treatment; an eight-year-old child who survived the boating accident that killed his little brother suffers the consequences of his mother's displaced guilt in ``Try to Remember.'' The most disturbing character, though, is the narrator of the title story, who thinks back on his childhood. Though sometimes imagining himself to be a 10-ton truck, he was just a human on the day his beloved big brother was thrown from a stolen motorcycle--``his back was all twisted, broken. I didn't know what to do. All I could manage was to shout vroom out of habit. If I'd've been an ambulance, I could have carted Fredo off in a flash to the Emergency Room.'' Saumont's language, lucidly translated here by Liebow, is protean, successfully re-creating a childish idiom reminiscent of the Sempe-Goscinny books in ``Who Went and Dumped All That Salt in All That Water?'' and an all-too-adult irony in ``The Alterpiece.'' Although overuse and excessive reduction can make some of her more telegraphic efforts tedious, the occasional failure is perhaps the price one pays for being willing to risk so much. (Sept.)