Blackbird

This new translation of a 1980 French novel may be of interest only to those looking for literary connections. Most of the sprawling, impressionistic narration is by ""Anton Blackbird,'' a psychiatric patient in New York's Bellevue Hospital. Octogenarian Blackbird is a gifted painter and pianist and, in his Notebooks, a feverish writer. We follow him from his bourgeois Jewish youth in Prague to a Swiss sanatorium during World War I; then to Vienna, Berlin and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. American psychiatrist Clockwork, as we see in his Notes, becomes obsessed with ``the truth'' about Blackbird, who says his real name is Anton Huka, lost literary genius. He may also be Antoine Choucas, famous French musician who killed his father and vanished in 1934. In addition to the Notebooks and Notes there are entries from a strange ``Bestiary of the Yellow Notebook,'' surrealistic visions of violence involving birds. Swollen with literary allusions and portentous omens about doomed loves, the novel is all-around heavy going. (March 30)