BOOK REVIEW : Rush of Alter Egos Crowds Out a Life : A FEAST IN THE GARDEN <i> by George Konrad</i> ; <i> translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein</i> ; A. Helen and Kort Wolff Book; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $23.95; 361 pages

“What you see here is an endlessly teeming mind facing the finiteness of a book,” George Konrad announces near the start of his autobiographical fantasy. The Hungarian writer has set up a contest between his mind and his book. Sometimes the book holds firm; more often, the endlessly teeming mind bursts it.

Couldn’t Konrad, author of the harshly moving novel “The Loser,” have hemmed “endlessly teeming” in, here and there, and shaped it so it would fit? It seems to me that this is what an artist does.

If you express all your breath into a trumpet, your breath goes “whooosh”; to get a note you need to compress it. A carpenter’s confession is generally less valuable than his tables. Just because a writer, especially a fantasy-autobiographer, works in confession instead of wood doesn’t mean that the purpose isn’t a table of some kind.

Konrad lived as a Jew under the Nazis, as a believer of sorts, for a while, under the communists, and then for decades as a persistent dissident, who worked as a sociologist, a journalist and a novelist, and who steadily refused exile.

He has no lack of material to set down for a life. He is at his best when, through David Kobra, a fictional alter ego, he does set it down.

The weakness lies in his attempt, through Kobra and a number of other alter egos, to expand this life into all life. The author does not settle for letting the particular resonate so that it suggests the universal.

Instead, he scatters extensive passages of speculation, commentary and emotional outcry among the alter egos. And he devises lush, omniscient panoramas to serve as overviews of a society and milieu--the Budapest intelligentsia--through the shifting decades.

The story of Konrad/Kobra growing up is a rich one and beautifully told. His family was settled, prosperous and respected in the agricultural town of Ujfalu. His father, a hardware merchant, was a gentle, cultivated man.

In World War I he chose to serve in the artillery out of distaste for personal violent encounters. His mother, even more of a pacifist, encouraged the choice. “There is so much room in the world where there aren’t people,” she told him. “That’s where you should aim.”

It was not until 1944 that Ujfalu’s Jews were arrested and deported; David’s parents survived and came back. They rebuilt the business and carried it on until 1950 when it was nationalized. David, 11, and the other children took shelter with their uncle and aunt in Budapest.

It was a precarious shelter. Uncle Arnold, who had run a cabaret, was shot by a Hungarian storm trooper. Klara, his cousin, playmate and eventual lover, slipped a knife into the trooper’s back.

Konrad writes of bleakness, deprivation and terror, but also of the rich human contradictions along the frontier that Eastern Europe has always been.

There is a lovely line in which he speaks of Arnold, a boulevardier who gave up his seductions when he married Zsuzsa, who was much younger. From that time, “he was unfaithful to other women with his wife.”

It is Zsuzsa who keeps the family going. On the day the Germans pull out, she leads the children downtown to reclaim their old apartment, occupied by an old pro-German couple. There is confrontation and compromise.

The old couple, who would calmly have watched Zsuzsa and the children taken off to be gassed, now share the apartment. They grumble about the children eating their dog’s potatoes. A hellish wartime chasm turns into the fretful fissures of peace.

From these war scenes, the book moves to tell what happens to Kobra and the friends he makes growing up in postwar Budapest. Janos, the group’s magnetic leader, flees to Yugoslavia after taking part in the 1956 uprising.

From there he swims to Trieste and makes his way to America where he becomes a much sought-after professor and writer. Laura, his wife, follows him; she becomes an invalid and commits suicide.

Kobra stays on, enduring the repression and stolidly maintaining his dissident writing until, as things loosen up, he becomes a kind of tolerated protester. He marries Regina, the daughter of his former lover, Klara, who had become a dancer and moved to New York.

Klara, half-deranged by what she has gone through, returns to become a fractured voice among the alter egos. Janos returns more comfortably. Exile has worn out now that the alternative--this is the 1980s--is no longer tyranny but an aging, corrupt bureaucracy with strong consumerist urgings.

Janos becomes the lover of Melinda, Klara’s much younger half-sister; and his voice discourses on the contradictions, puzzlements and aimlessness of a time when all causes are dying. Melinda, in whose garden the old friends and their memories meet, is another voice, representing more spontaneous and down-to-earth human values.

As characters, recounted in the third person, all these figures have an appealing and complex reality. But Konrad gives them voices, endless voices, his voice.

He wants to go beyond a novelist’s limits, in this summing-up; he wants to tell everything. His talent, considerable as it is, does not extend so far. The universal voices are windy and not interesting enough to claim our attention.

“I am writing,” he tells us, “a novel about a fictitious novel.” That is four levels up from ground level. His wings are not strong enough for the flight.