Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History

A lonely, balding New Yorker with no prospects (and a taste for classical poetry) has an earthly vision that sends him all over Europe--and ultimately to an American death row--in the haunting 12th work of fiction from Dutch expatriate Koning (The Petersburg-Cannes Express; A Walk With Love and Death). Hoping to escape his habitual ""great feeling of unease,"" a bookstore clerk named Lucas scrapes together his meager savings for a solo trip to Spain. On the last day of his vacation, he glimpses a woman whose superhuman beauty (""not by the standards of men, even of poets, but by those of rivers, rain, nature"") suddenly cures him of his dread. In his subsequent pursuit of this mysterious woman-goddess, Lucas uncovers a murder, runs afoul of a shady tycoon, falls in with Basque terrorists and, along the way, develops what seem to be extrasensory perceptions of the bloody history and sinister politics hidden all around him. In other hands, this obscure allegory might collapse under its own portentousness, but Koning writes with a dreamlike combination of paranoia and willed naivete that gives his ironic, evocative prose a charming, childlike moral logic. He wastes no effort making Lucas sound like the American he claims to be: his British English and his humanism (part historical sense, part faith in the smallness of human motives and institutions) belong unmistakably to the Old World. In the same way, Koning makes no attempt at plausible political satire. The facts of our court system, say, or of corporate censorship don't interest him. What does interest him is the irrational hope that Beauty stills hold out to us at the end of our century--a hope that, in this telling, won't fail to interest his readers as well. (Oct.)