Womb at the End of the World : AFTER SHOCKS / NEAR ESCAPES; <i> By Stephen Dobyns</i> ; <i> (Viking: $19.95; 268 pp.) </i>

“Then, at 3:00 o’clock, everything changed.”

Lucy, 8, was playing with her brothers in their garden at the edge of a small town in southern Chile. Here is some of what she remembers, years later:

Off to the south, a glitter of silver caught her eye. “Then I saw it was the railway tracks, but not lying motionless, a pair of silver parallel lines running straight and flat with hardly any deviation for a thousand kilometers from Santiago to Puerto Montt. Now they had come alive as if dancing. They were heaving and rearing up in the dim afternoon light and resembled two silver serpents cavorting and rushing toward us at the same time . . . and then we saw in the distance how the ground turned to water . . .”

Stephen Dobyns’ haunting novel is about a childhood that collapsed in the Chilean earthquake of 1963. But the lucid, troubled voice of Lucy--the child and narrator--tells of a slower, more universal earthquake, one that shatters the landscape of all childhoods so we live among shards from that time on. Once the ground turns to water, it can never be solid again.

When the quake hits, the facade of Lucy’s house peels off, and Lucy’s mother is exposed suddenly, her mouth O-shaped. She clambers out, unhurt; a woman rushes up to whisper something, and the mother tears downtown. Her husband is lying dead on the sidewalk, his head cradled in his mistress’ arms. Both are in their underwear. The mother drives the other woman away with a stick, loads her husband’s corpse into a wheelbarrow, and manages to be first in line at the undertaker’s.

It is one displaced detail of a world turned upside down, its secrets suddenly spilled out. Dobyns has the gift to imagine the human quality of unimaginable events. Through the eyes of a child, he gives us the lighter-than-air gestures of calamity: cows lifted off their feet, bells ringing crazily, a woman hopping down the road with a large boulder hopping after her. “People were looking at everything very hard, staring hard, and it seemed I could feel their eye muscles ache. There was so much to see.”

Lucy’s mother and her three children find shelter in the sheep ranch, just outside town, that belongs to her parents. Of German descent, Lucy’s grandparents are the center of an extended family. Pilar, heavy-set and emotional, is the matriarch and keeper of the family pieties; Hector, slight-built and immersed in his farm work, seems as unsubstantial as one of the outbuildings he is continually working on.

The ranch structures are badly damaged but the family, swelling with the arrival of uncles and cousins, camps out wrapped in blankets against the chilly rain, and eating potfuls of mutton around a smoky fire. Soon a large room is cleared of rubble, and all 19 or 20 of them manage to squeeze in. There they will stay for weeks, rushing out with each new set of temblors, and waiting for the final one which, Pilar insists, will definitively reunite the family by taking it all in a bunch up to heaven. Lucy visualizes a chartered bus.

Pilar’s eschatological vision--each evening she reads aloud the story of Noah--broods over her collection of relatives, numb with shock and driven from their individual lives back into this end-of-the-world family womb.

Clorinda, Pilar’s spinster sister, puts on a bridal dress and lies down to wait for her bridegroom, Death. Bibiana, another sister, flutters about, childlike and fey. Lucy’s normally active uncles, Alcibiades and Hellmuth, vegetate, stunned into passivity. Miriam, another relative, drinks steadily while waiting to be sent for by her husband who is making a fortune outside, profiteering from earthquake damage. Dalila, Hellmuth’s beautiful, empty-headed wife, sits in their car, mourning her house and her pretty things, all of them destroyed.

The vision of imminent Heaven lies like a pall over the household. The only resistance comes from Hector, whose hammer sounds incessantly from outside, rebuilding over and over the sheds that each new temblor knocks down again. He is a sign of life; so is the Indian maid who sweeps the petals off the walk each morning. If she is to die, she insists, she will die sweeping.

It is a duel between Heaven and Earth, and at first, Heaven has it. Bit by bit, though, it is dislodged. Alcibiades falls passionately in love with Dalila, though the passion is never quite consummated. Hellmuth is annoyed; but mostly he grows restless because he wants to get out and make some money. Eventually, Miriam’s husband, with more profiteering than he can handle, sends for as many of the men as will come. The family--so unnaturally joined--disperses, and Pilar--Noah no longer--settles back into her private prayers.

Dobyns draws memorably varied portraits of the family members, so oddly forced together. Each is decidedly individual, but with so many individualities packed so closely, the effect is that of a hive of buzzing, stinging eccentricities.

The focus, though, is on the children. Spartaco, Lucy’s older brother, has little use for Heaven, and keeps darting out after adventure. Manfredo, the youngest, clings to Pilar’s skirts, and falls temporarily mute. Lucy is caught between. The loss of her father--kind and gentle, if restless--is her piercing sorrow. Perhaps her grandmother is right; perhaps the quickest way to see him is to die and go to Heaven. She falls ill in fact, and only recovers when her grandfather comes and sings her a comic ballad about an earlier earthquake. Old Hector is life, and life prevails.

Dobyns writes with grace and an insight that is frequently magical. His most special achievement is the two timbres of Lucy’s voice. One of them is harsh; it belongs to the woman, in her late 30s and bruised by life, whom Lucy grows up to become. The other is flutelike and unmodulated. As Lucy seeks to remember herself as a child, her voice becomes a child’s. And periodically, and with great emotional effect, she breaks into the child voice and cries out with adult pain.

“After Shocks/Near Escapes” has its static moments as it develops the day-by-day entanglements, the tensions and gradual awakening in the stunned, pressed-together household. But its portrait of a child moving childlike through calamity, and, years later, showing its scars, is unforgettable. As the narrator speaks in her two registers, her childhood takes shape around her as disenchantedly real, in part; and, in part, with the distortions, enlargements and unalterable magic of memory.