ONE SENSES THAT, like many another Bildungsroman, this novel, sprawling episodically over the childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of its central character, might have been subtitled 'Instead of an Autobiography'. Lke her heroine Dinah, Barbara Trapido grew up, the daughter of European immigrants, in South Afiica; like her, she married a historian (in the novel Sam, in real life Stan), also a child of European immigrants, whom she accompanied to England to escape the increasing horrors of apartheid.Dinah has an older sister, Lisa, who, despite a mallbrmed arm (the result of an injury at birth), is destined always to be more attractive than she is. Trapido's depiction of the relationshp between the two girls - at first one of mutual dependence as they close ranks against an