December 9, 1984

THE SICILIAN By Mario Puzo. 410 pp. New York: Linden Press/ Simon & Schuster. $17.95. High in the hills of Sicily, in an ancient castle overlooking the sea, the Duchess of Pratoameno was sitting alone in her salon sipping tea when suddenly the splendor of her afternoon was interrupted by a young gentleman who, after bowing to kiss her hand, casually informed her that he and his fellow bandits had surrounded her castle and would not be leaving until she had surrendered to them all of her jewelry, including the large diamond ring that adorned the finger he had, seconds before, so tenderly touched. With indignation, the duchess refused. But as he persisted in a manner both polite and menacing, the duchess, reasoning that her personal well-being and that of her family was surely worth more than her possessions, finally acquiesced, pleading only that she be allowed to keep her ring. ''It is the engagement ring given me by my husband,'' she explained, ''a memory of my youth and of our love.'' Deftly removing the ring from her finger, the bandit replied, ''Knowing this will make me treasure it even more.''

A Federal jury tonight found Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, not guilty of libeling the Rev. Jerry Falwell in a parody advertisement accusing the evangelist of drunkenness and incest but awarded him a total of $200,000 in damages. The jury ruled there was no libel because the advertisement's claims, published in the sexually explicit magazine, were too outrageous to be believed. But it said Mr. Falwell, who is head of Moral Majority, was entitled to $100,000 in actual damages for emotional distress and to $100,000 in punitive damages for what it said was a malicious parody. Mr. Flynt's lawyers said they planned to ask Federal District Judge James C. Turk to set aside the award and said they were prepared to appeal to the United States Supreme Court if necessary.

Arab hijackers holding a Kuwaiti airliner at the airport here freed 39 more hostages today, but still retained 18, including two Americans and three Kuwaiti officials, diplomats and the Iranian press agency said. The hijackers said they would ''keep the guilty ones'' and reportedly threatened to put the Americans on trial. At one point today, according to the Iranian press agency, one American, identified as Charles Kipper, told the control tower that the hijackers wanted to end the crisis peacefully. ''Please meet their demands because they are serious,'' he was quoted as having said. ''Please prevent further killings.''

This year had all the makings of the best of times for the American Broadcasting Companies. An enormous number of people were glued to their sets when ABC telecast last summer's Los Angeles Olympics, kicking off two months of glory as the top-rated network in prime time. ABC reaped the record revenues and profits that a No. 1 Nielsen rating usually entails. But the year's promise has all but fizzled. And when ABC's top executives went before the board of directors of their affiliated stations last week in Maui, the accolades were intermingled with tough questions about strategy.

THERE are two Jerry Krawczyks at the Michaelian County Office Building in White Plains. One, a 37-year-old, 200-pound bearded Eastchester resident in jacket and tie, works on the first floor as a program analyst for the Office of Employment and Training. The other, a 19-year-old, 170-pound, beardless Port Chester resident in combat fatigues, is a portrait hanging on the wall of the second-floor Bridge Gallery. The younger Jerry Krawczyk fought in a war in a tiny Southeast Asian country, a conflict that, 18 years later, the other Jerry Krawczyk can't forget. ''I look at that picture and I'm back there, as if it were yesterday,'' Mr. Krawczyk said of a photograph taken in 1967. It shows him and other members of his outfit, India Company, Third Battalion, Third Marine Division, crossing a stream in Vietnam. ''You never lose what's in your mind. You can almost go back and see the terrain and you can almost remember what you were doing that day.'' But there are Westchester residents, he suggested, who do not remember, or do not want to remember, Vietnam. And there are others who have a distorted impression of the men and women who were stationed there.