The Dog King

From Christoph Ransmayr, whose brilliant rise to preeminence among the younger generation of writers in the German language was recently crowned when he shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize--a novel in which fiction and history are forged into a universe of mythic intensity.      World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its agricultural past.      The bomb has