FICTION

TARATUTA and STILL LIFE WITH PIPE by Jose Donoso , translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa (W.W. Norton; $17.95; 160 pp.) Does art imitate life or vice versa? Or is the relationship between the two subtler and more playful than either of these maxims suggests? This is what Jose Donoso, one of Chile’s leading novelists (“The Obscene Bird of Night”), would conclude, offering us these two novellas as evidence.

In “Taratuta,” a writer tries to uncover the truth about a minor character in the Russian Revolution, a red-bearded crony of Lenin’s whose specialty was “expropriating” (stealing) money for the Bolshevik treasury. The man’s true name, character and activities slide into the chinks of biased or slipshod histories and disappear. The narrator’s reconstruction of the revolutionaries’ exile in Paris is almost entirely fiction. But the fact that Taratuta did, in some sense, exist is enough to give a possible descendant--a wan and disconnected young man the narrator meets in Madrid--a whole new “plot” to live by. And, indeed, the youth’s story displaces Taratuta’s as the novella’s central focus.

In “Still Life With Pipe,” art comes to the rescue of a stilted bank clerk and his old-maidish fiancee, via a rascally old artist who poses as the caretaker of a museum of his own paintings. Art itself is nothing, the old man maintains; life is art. What does this mean? Well, the strange, ugly Surrealist or Cubist paintings work on the couple until eventually they start a new life within the frame of the old man’s vision: a bohemian, Parisian life of wine bottles, checkerboards, guitars and kimonos. Not that their old life wasn’t also a work of art. It was just as “framed,” as artificial, as the new one. Their new life, Donoso implies, is simply better art: brighter, less kitschy, unsettled enough to give amorous blood room to stir.