Books: Mexico & Metaphysics

THE SIGN OF TAURUS (320 pp.)—William Fifield—Holf, Rinehart, Winston ($4.95).

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.

One day, after watching a blowsy clairvoyant telling fortunes in a Mexican cave, the countess receives a suggestion that both repels and...