On page one of Seth Rogoff’s new novel, “The Castle,” Sy Kirschbaum arrives alone and confused in the village of Z. Sy, we know from previous books by Rogoff (“First, the Raven” and “The Kirschbaum Lectures,” both reviewed in these pages) is the noted translator of that masterpiece of modern Czech fiction, “Blue, Red, Gray.” It took 17 years and arguably drove him crazy.

Sy’s physical experiences on entering Z. closely follow those of another arrival in the same place, which sets in motion another Czech novel, also called “The Castle.” The difference is that in the roughly hundred years since Franz Kafka’s febrile imagination brought K. to the populous village of Z., it has been deserted, evidently suddenly.

Snow is falling, and all Sy can find is wood for a stove to keep him warm in a decrepit inn, and endless jars of pickled fruits and vegetables to stave off hunger. If it sounds bleak, that’s because it is. However, Sy is determined to succeed where K. failed: to penetrate the Castle and its mysterious workings. Rogoff’s Castle takes the form of his daily notes, which become increasingly hallucinatory, over a period greater than a fortnight. By the end, enveloped in darkness, he can no longer tell day from night.

Actually, of course, it is incorrect to say that K. failed. Kafka died before he completed his book, so who knows whether Sy is following K.’s footsteps or trying to complete K.’s quest? Either way, he encounters many of Kafka’s characters in the village. His world is like “the layers of an onion — text-in-text-in-text-in-text.”

As to Sy, Julia, his current lover, tells him that “you created me, and I created you — and these two fictions met in some other work, authored by neither of us, and neither of us know how this other work began or how it will end, or even what will happen on the very next page.” We are in “inter-textual” territory.

Rogoff himself was born in Portland and now lives in Prague, where he teaches at the Anglo-American University. He is also on the faculty of the University of Southern Maine. He knows Kafka’s book inside and out, having translated it, an effort he called a “life-changing experience.” While it would be facile to make a direct link between his and Kirschbaum’s work as translators, it seems to have landed them together in the same place: the village of Z., picking up “The Castle” at the place Kafka stopped in mid-sentence.

In Kafka’s book, Rogoff was particularly affected by its “core resistance to any unified or integrated interpretive scheme.” In his own, he takes this to the limit, leaving the reader “suspended at the frayed end of a tangle of narrative threads, to have to sift through options, to have to assemble a story or stories on one’s own, knowing that the result will be incomplete.”

On top of the figures from Kafka, Rogoff’s world, as endured by Sy Kirschbaum, is a phantasmagoria of haunting characters: a controlling psychiatrist, a wild Czech author, another writer who might be either a rival or Sy’s invention. Lovers past and maybe present, refugees and anarchists either pursue various books or manuscripts or write them; are they looking for the texts or what has been erased? One of these is from a 13th-century Jewish mystic, which prompts various interpretations of the story of Cain and Abel. Which leads to the prominent appearance of the mark of Cain in Sy’s ruminations. As in “The Kirchbaum Lectures,” the author’s familiarity with the Jewish Bible is impressive, not to say arcane.

Undeniably, it’s complicated. This is not most people’s idea of a beach read. Rogoff doesn’t go in for that kind of writing. The reader lands abruptly in Kafka’s world — “Nebel und Finsterniss,” fog and darkness, not just of the land but of the soul — and from there burrows into the world psyche. Easing the reader’s way is the author’s limpid prose, and behind that a beguiling kaleidoscope of variations upon metaphysical variations.

“Aren’t we all tired of pretending that we know the full story — that we even know much about the central protagonist of our lives, ourselves?” the author asked in a 2019 interview. It is, perhaps, a challenging statement. If you can accept the challenge, “The Castle” by Seth Rogoff is a rewarding, thought-provoking read.

Thomas Urquhart is the author of “For the Beauty of the Earth,” and “Up for Grabs! Timber Pirates, Lumber Barons and the Battles Over Maine’s Public Lands.”