An Eastern European writer does not have to look far to find his subject. The subject, most often, chooses him. In Poland, the Second World War, the country's turbulent history, the conditions created by an artificially imposed and often intolerably oppressive system—these are the given, the almost inevitable, matters which an author must confront if he is to understand his own and his countrymen's condition. They are matters which have preoccupied—even obsessed—Tadeusz Konwicki, one of Poland's eminent and more difficult writers. in his previous novels, such as "The Dreambook for Our Time,"… he treated "the Polish question"—or "the Polish complex"—with gingerly indirectness, often through fragments of personal and veiled memories. [In "The Polish Complex"], he approaches it head on, with full philosophical steam and not an ounce of rage held back. The result is a novel that has the energy and the weaknesses...