Books: Unlikely Archetype

THE REVOLUTIONARY by Hans Koningsberger. 212 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Hans Koningsberger is an unabashed romantic who believes that intuition is a novelist’s best guide. In a few spare, insightful bedroom novels (The Affair, An American Romance), his judgment could hardly be faulted. Last year, after a brief tour of Red China, Koningsberger attempted to add his own intuition to China reportage. The result, Love and Hate in China, was both unknowing and superficial.

Now pressing on into politics, Koningsberger sets out to delineate the psyche of a revolutionary. In this case, the revolutionary is a young university student, known in the book only as A., who out of dislike for his bourgeois parents drifts from membership in a mild radical party to participation in an assassination plot with bomb-throwing anarchists. Any work on this subject inevitably demands comparison with some 20th century masterpieces, including Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Camus’ long essay The Rebel. In that company, Koningsberger is hopelessly out of place; what is more, his character is also out of date. A.’s home is an imaginary European country, not Africa or Asia, where the action is. Furthermore, A. is totally unversed in Mao, Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara, who are far more relevant in the current revolutionary situations than the drawing-room Marx that A. and his friends are apt to spout.