The Halfway House. Guillermo Rosales. Translated by Anna Kushner. New Directions. 122 pages. $14.95 in paper.

We've had it up to here with the lying memoirist. We are weary of the unreliable narrator. But some books work against all the odds. Some novels carry a wallop of truth that can't be matched by nonfiction.

And so we have Halfway House, a slice of gritty realism. A slim, brilliant book. Originally written in 1987, it's available now in English. We learn in José Manuel Prieto's heartfelt and enlightening preface that the character William Figueras is the alter ego of author Rosales.

When Figueras arrived in Miami from Cuba in the 1980s, he was met by relatives who expected a dignified man of letters and found instead a schizophrenic derelict. (The two are not mutually exclusive.) For six months they shuffle him from one psychiatric ward to another until he ends up at the boarding home that gives the book its title. Unless you count the fact that Figueras is on a heavy dose of Melleril, that he arrived in Miami under a cloud of existential dread, this is not an anti- or pro-Castro book. Many people take psychotropic meds. And, as Figueras says early on, ``I'm not a political exile. I'm a complete exile.''

A convincing one, too. Although it is hard to believe him when he says by age 15 he had read Proust, Joyce, Hesse, Miller and Mann. Maybe he's simply trying to suggest his influences, all those wizards of the margins.

Rosales/Figueras has the chops and uses them to introduce us quickly to the residents and chief sadists of the boarding home. Residents mark their territory by urinating or by raping. The milder ones steal. The owner is that classic trifecta: corrupt, cheap and wealthy. The overseer is a brute. Throw in the raw lentils, fetid sheets and towels, overflowing plumbing, and we realize how quickly anyone immersed in this hell will become immobilized. Figueras tries to fight that condition because he realizes that to give in to totalitarianism -- on a large island or in a small halfway house -- is to go from being a witness to being complicit. He details his frustrations graphically and honestly.

This is prison writing of the highest order. But Rosales is never grandiose. He implies and leaves it to the reader to conclude whether he's talking about one small house or one large condition.

Betsy Willeford is a writer in Miami.

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