BOOK REVIEW : An Author’s Voices Collected From Isolation : BET THEY’LL MISS US WHEN WE’RE GONE: Stories <i> by Marianne Wiggins</i> ; HarperCollins $19.95, 180 pages

Marianne Wiggins walks at the edge of disappearance. She leads us up a precipitous route, and sometimes neither of us makes it. She goes out of sight, we get lost. And when we emerge, we wonder where we have been. When we do make it--when we both do--we are in a place where no one has been and with a view nobody else could have found.

In her last collection of stories, “Herself in Love,” and in “John Dollar,” her novel about a band of children marooned on an island in South Asia, Wiggins achieved a breathtaking view and only occasional lost patches. This new collection seems more uneven, but several of the pieces give off a light so intense that it almost illuminates some of the darker ones.

Unusual in a contemporary short story collection, there is no title piece. “Bet They’ll Miss Us When We’re Gone” does not refer to any individual story. Rather, it suggests the spirit and the circumstances in which many of them were written. Wiggins shared the forced isolation of her husband, Salman Rushdie, when both went into hiding in Great Britain after the death threat issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini over Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.”

Hiding is too peaceful a word. It reflects neither their life nor the inflamed, breaking-of-worlds quality of the most brilliant of the stories in the collection. Rushdie and Wiggins lived as if they were actively hunted quarry, harried from burrow to burrow. At the behest of the British security forces, they moved and hid, moved and hid, dozens of times.

To a writer, this kind of hiding is close to starvation, with a diet of images reduced to a thin and monotonous gruel that is offered and snatched away. Both Wiggins and Rushdie have since found differing ways to break out. But Wiggins used what she had: The pain, anger and starvation of her fleeing concealment.

“We were on the lam in Wales, running through the Black Mountains like unarmed smugglers from the righteous with their guns. Everywhere we went there were slate tombstones, upright shadows, on the hills. In the towns there were slate houses with slate roofs. There was darkness, dead as coal, behind the windows of the houses. There were ravens in the fields and on the roads.”

This is the start of perhaps the finest piece in the collection, “Croeso i Gymru,” which means approximately treasure in Wales. Memoir rather than fiction, it elevates to a fierce work of imagination the soaring movements of the fettered writer.

Wiggins seizes on everything that is tangibly in sight, forging a chain of words and associations and swinging up on it to achieve what almost seems like freedom. There were pussy willows out, but in Wales, these are “goat” willows. She learns this from a book about trees, left on a shelf in the strangers’ cottage that the police put them into.

From there she goes to the dictionary--her book of salvation--that she always carries with her. She looks up capkin, finds a synonym with ament , which also means “mentally deficient person.” She looks out the window; the lack of a garden reminds her that she has read that the Welsh never grew potatoes; instead, they used oats in a stew called “cawl” flavored with a sheep’s knuckle. From there to the word for sheep, dafad; from there to daffodils, and on and on.

She tells of projects. “One day I cooked a swede (a kind of turnip) for instance. It seems to take forever. . . . One day I tried to learn about the game of rugby. I made a project out of watching birds for about a minute every other day. . . . “ A friend writes that her daughter is doing a school project on blinking. “This was a subject I filed away for future use.”

She goes from there to a Welsh phrase-book, to the items in the local newspaper (“From Penderyn: The Competition ‘The Most Unusual Teapot’ was won by Mrs. Cooke.”), to the ancient Celtic sense that writing was magical and to be hidden, to a list of the next day’s projects:

“Tomorrow I will shout at planes and jets that come at us like arrows (their cottage is near a military proving-ground). Tomorrow I will burn myself on what I take to be a cinder. Tomorrow I will find the picture with the diagram inside the book that tells me finally, simply and beyond a doubt, the way religion tells some people, This tiny thing of beauty in the tree outside your window is a chaffinch, Marianne.”

It is not solace or acceptance, but rage and defiance. Wiggins’ unique gift is to be able, sometimes, to use anger to deliver the world’s beauty as well as its terror. It cracks her voice, and it is in this cracking--since otherwise, anger usually blurs and muffles--that these things are expressed.

Many of the stories in this book experiment with different voices for cracking. In a companion piece to the Welsh one, Wiggins writes of a trip to visit another writer’s prison: Anne Frank’s garret. In Amsterdam, the torment of concealment suddenly becomes the torment of publicity. The newspapers have headlines about her separation from Rushdie. The world is an assaulting stranger; Wiggins conveys the strangeness by writing in a deliberately coarse travesty of Dutch-accented English. The voices grow wilder; anger can go off the track. In an odd construct of Southern black speech, she tells of a child brainwashed into idiocy by her brother and sister. “Eso Es” is an elaborate, surreal and--to me--unfathomable story of an old Spaniard persecuted by angels.

A simpler voice is used for one of the best pieces. “Counting” is a haunting, complex story about an old schoolteacher. Unsettled by the information and technology blitz of modern life, where humane purposes are overshadowed by statistical and bottom-line calculations, she draws up lists and charts of numbers to devise a shorthand for tragedy.

Ranging from extraordinary to slight, from dazzling to obscure, Wiggins’ voices remind me of a line in a Negro spiritual. “The rock cried, I’m burning too,” it goes. Wiggins demands that the rocks speak. Some are silent, or garbled; others have voices of fire.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Lady’s Maid: A Novel of the Nineteenth Century,” by Margaret Forster (Doubleday).