The English Years, by Norbert Gstrein, trans. by Anthea Bell

An elegant, sinister tale of exile and betrayal

Having fled Nazi Austria to be interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, Gabriel Hirschfelder lives as a cantankerous recluse in Southend-on-Sea while his one published book slowly gathers a reputation as a masterpiece of the Jewish experience of exile.

After his death, a young Viennese woman on holiday in London visits an exhibition of photographs of Austrian émigrés, and strikes up a friendship with Hirschfelder's third and last wife, Margaret. The visitor has already heard of Hirschfelder; her ex-husband, a writer called Max, was an admirer. But her image of this revered literary figure is clouded when Margaret reveals that, on his deathbed, Hirschfelder spoke of having murdered a man in the internment camp.

Near the beginning of this, his first novel set outside his native Austria (and his first translated into English), Norbert Gstrein addresses his own difficult relation to his subject. Max's hommage à Hirschfelder, we are told, was rejected by critics who accused him of "latching on to a fashion, since there was no other reason why he should take an interest in the life of an exile, particularly when the man was Jewish, whereas he himself knew nothing about it."

As if to highlight this presumption, Gstrein narrates his story through the voice of the Austrian woman. Her pursuit of the truth about Hirschfelder – recounted in that anxious, questioning style that runs through modern German fiction from Max Frisch to its most baroque elaboration in WG Sebald – is also an attempt to lay the ghost of her failed marriage.

As she tracks down the other women in Hirschfelder's life, what they tell her only deepens the mystery. What happened to the girl he left in Austria? Why did he never revisit a family he lodged with before internment? And who was the stranger who joined him on the Isle of Man?

Contrasting chapters – addressed, startlingly, to Hirschfelder, in the second person – vividly evoke life in the camps: the routine, the smells, the queasy intimacy and resentments of men penned up together. It is fortunate that Anthea Bell, who translated Sebald's Austerlitz, can render these shifts of tone with such assurance. Things the narrator cannot know, but can only have imagined, form the most sharply realised parts of the book, while her direct experiences have an air of unreality (we never learn her name).

On one level, this elegant and troubling book can be read as a gripping tale of war, imprisonment and betrayal, culminating in a Faustian card game and spectacular shipwreck. On another, it is a novel about imposture, moral as well as physical: claiming to speak of things one has no right to speak of. As such, it probes the dilemma not only of German-language writers investigating their nations' past, but the novelist's art itself. What does fiction consist of but expropriating the experience of others, of pretending to understand what we can never understand: what it's like to inhabit someone else's skin?