Word: countesses
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...Sign of Taurus, by William Fifield. A curious novel in which the astrological notions of an old Polish countess are mixed with exuberant descriptions of Mexico's sights and sounds; the result, happily, is a triumph of Mexico over metaphysics...
...after watching a blowsy clairvoyant telling fortunes in a Mexican cave, the countess receives a suggestion that both repels and attracts her. With her own fortunes sadly reversed, why not ply the fortunetelling trade herself...
...Countess Potolska sits in the sun-dazed plazas of Mexico, but her eyes blindly stare at aristocratic Polish drawing rooms, the image of Pilsudski, and her 20-year-old son standing in the streets of Warsaw in grim defiance of Nazi soldiery. Hawk-eyed and hawk-beaked, the countess is a Polish Jewess and a refugee, one of the world's involuntary tourists whose heaviest luggage is memory...
...this has the makings of the good gay farce that Novelist Fifield has chosen not to write. As the crystal ball clouds, the plot turns metaphysical. The countess half-believes in contact with a psychic realm that goes far beyond trickery or even telepathy. At a table-rapping seance, the countess herself is taken aback when her dead son's voice materializes. Finally, her crystal ball reveals tragedy in a bull ring, and a picador is killed...
While only a confirmed horoscope addict will find all this fully convincing, any reader will be impressed by Author Fifield's rendering of the trancelike intensity with which the countess' conscious mind pearl-dives into her unconscious. Author Fifield speculates intriguingly on religious and metaphysical questions. Does the ability to foretell a future event presuppose predestination? Are times past, present and future coeval? These questions are more fully developed than the novel's characters, who seem to exist like cards in a deck, merely to take plot tricks...