The Loves of Faustyna

Though the publisher's blurb for FitzPatrick's second novel calls it ``a riotous sexual odyssey,'' readers will quickly ascertain that what's most at stake is not sex but politics, and though the blurb refers to the narrator's ``shapely bottom,'' readers will be pleased to encounter a yet more provocative mind. Set in Poland during the Communist years of the 1960s, The Loves of Faustyna echoes the passion and humor characteristic of Milan Kundera's stories of life under dictatorship, when pursuits of love and friendship become entangled necessarily in dissent, interrogation, subterfuge and incarceration. ``To all outward appearances we were a modern society,'' says Faustyna of a nation besieged by secret police, ``But in truth... we were once again a neolithic tribe reduced to fornication, food-gathering and ritual incantations.'' Pregnant with her daughter, Julia, Faustyna quips that the girl has two fathers, one a soldier in the army and the other a worker for Solidarity. At last arrested for treason, Faustyna's lyrically comic look at prison erupts in confusion about precisely with which side she is supposed to have been collaborating. The result is a novel that trains a wistful, intelligent gaze at someone trying to be a woman when her very personhood is at risk. Passages in which hatred is likened to ``inherited despair'' and in which the narrator muses on ``the overwhelming maleness of violence and power... its eagerness to sheath itself in metal and leather and brass buckles,'' reveal an author of remarkable wisdom and clarity. National advertising. (Mar.)