The astonishing Holocaust novel I mentioned earlier was Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966), which I read last night on either side of seeing To Be or Not to Be (1942). I cannot possibly do justice to it, but I'm trying not to let everything slip past just because I feel like someone replaced my sinuses with damp cheesecloth.

The Glass Pearls was Pressburger's second published novel. His first was the critically and commercially acclaimed Killing a Mouse on Sunday (1961), probably better known nowadays in its Gregory Peck-starring film incarnation, Fred Zinneman's Behold a Pale Horse (1964). Its follow-up was not acclaimed. Hollywood did not come calling. It garnered one brutally dismissive review and no second printing—critically, commercially, it disappeared without a trace. Caitlin McDonald, who writes the second of this edition's two useful introductions, not unjustly likens it to Michael Powell's career-killing Peeping Tom (1960), with which it shares an uncomfortably sympathetic protagonist and an effortless inhabitation of mindsets and behaviors a "normal" person is not supposed to be able to get inside of. Powell put himself literally into Peeping Tom, drawing a disquieting link between the work of a film director and a serial killer. When Pressburger performs a similar trick with The Glass Pearls, it is especially striking because his protagonist is a Nazi.

In the spring of 1965, Karl Braun is a slight, solitary, middle-aged piano tuner who lives and works in West London. For recreation, he attends classical concerts on the discount tickets he gets from one of his fellow-lodgers and sometimes has dinner with another, both of them immigrants like himself; he thinks often of his wife and child who died more than twenty years ago in the air-raids of Hamburg, but has recently found himself pursuing a not quite romantic relationship with a young woman he met at the estate agency. She takes him to her favorite Chinese restaurant. He introduces her to Brahms and Tchaikovsky and Strauss. (She introduces him to a screamingly crowded beatnik dance club and he has a panic attack and passes out.) She finds him charming in an old-world sort of way, with his discreetly rakish stories of affairs and narrow escapes in Paris before the war. What she does not know, what no one in this scenario knows except the reader and the man who has for the last twenty years gone by the name of Karl Braun: he is a wanted war criminal, keeping an increasingly anxious weather eye on the news coming out of Ludwigsberg. It was bad enough when a former comrade actually made contact with him in England—now any time a stranger asks after him at the piano factory or one of his places of work, he gets so paranoid that he has to remind himself that "the natural function of a logical mind was to reduce mountains to molehills, not the other way round." His relationship with Helen Taylor progresses; so does his conviction that he is being followed, spied upon, elaborately set up to give himself away. Both plots come to a head during a trip to France, where Braun has promised to show Helen the real-life sites of every one of his Parisian adventures and, while she visits friends in the south of France, nip over the border to Zürich where he has business of an unspecified nature. Three, two, one, nothing in life ends as simply as it does in the movies, but there are things that are real and that no amount of retelling can magic away.

The one extant review of The Glass Pearls devotes way too much of its short wordcount to criticizing the author's choice of a Nazi as the main character and his failure to treat this fact as a shocking plot twist, when in reality the book would not work at all if the audience were not clued in from the outset. (The reviewer also calls the character of Helen "boring and stupid," which is the kind of book report I would expect from a last-minute sixth-grader, not the TLS.) For much of its runtime, it functions as a study in the banality of evil—still a new concept when Pressburger was writing—and the efficacy of compartmentalization, neither romanticizing nor demonizing Braun past the judgment of his own actions. He deeply misses his wife and child, with whom he knows he would have died in the British bombing raid if his work hadn't called him away on the night; he forms a friendship with a Jewish neighbor and listens seriously and sympathetically to the man's story of escaping occupied Prague by doctoring his name from "Kohn" to "Kolm." The stories he relates to an always interested Helen show him in a variety of lights from prankish lover to terrified exile, sometimes jaunty, sometimes petty, sometimes just getting along. It is not special pleading, however Braun's tight third-person perspective justifies itself. With the Eichmann trial in recent memory, Pressburger seems to have felt confident assuming his audience would take it as read that National Socialism was not a good thing, therefore he could push the terrible, relatable ordinariness of his protagonist further than the purely circumstantial sympathy of 49th Parallel (1941). In the first introduction to this edition, Kevin Macdonald notes that his grandfather "bizarrely . . . went so far as to imbue the Braun character with certain traits of his own; such that, to some degree, Braun is a self-portrait." This statement is true enough, but also conceals the novel's most resonant and devastating twist, which I am afraid I have to talk about if I want to explain why it affected me as strongly as it did.

All through the novel, the reader is teased with the nature of Braun's crimes when he was Herr Doktor Otto Reitmüller. We know by the end of the first chapter that he's a Nazi war criminal who has lived under the same assumed identity since the end of the war, patiently waiting for the twenty-year statute of limitations on war crimes to expire before withdrawing his money from its handily neutral account in Switzerland and emigrating to Argentina to join the rest of the "Brotherhood"; from the same scenes we gather that he was a doctor, although we don't learn his specialty until the night Braun catches himself thinking, "The nervous system and the brain! What magnificent creations they were! How much work had to be done to understand them. And how little one knew about them." Hints and clues as to the particulars of this "work" accrue irregularly and unsettlingly as the narrative unfolds, but despite a partial reveal in the first half of the novel and some mounting incongruities in the second, it waits until quite close to the finale to disclose the full story in all its ghoulishly believable fringe-science horror: he experimented on people's memories. Working with a population selected from the inmates of the (fictional) concentration camp of Wittau, Reitmüller asked his subjects to relate vivid episodes from their lives, carefully double-checking verbal histories against written narratives in order to make sure that the details were consistent; then he deliberately damaged their brains, surgically removing small portions of tissue from different areas and observing a short period of recuperation before asking the subjects for their stories again, noting discrepancies, seeing how much or how little of which parts of the brain needed to be destroyed before the memories began to vanish, before the ability to form new memories or organize old ones was gone for good, before people for all intents and purposes ceased to be themselves. Whenever possible, he repeated the operation on the same subject: "Three times the most. We had only one who survived four." None of his subjects ultimately survived the process of experimentation. But by the time he had to abandon his research and flee Wittau ahead of the advancing Allies, Reitmüller had accumulated notebooks full of case histories, and though he burned all his copies, he remembered their contents. All of the stories that provide the jaunty, petty, refugee past of the former press-photographer, now piano-tuner "Karl Braun" are the stolen memories of his victims, their loves, hopes, fears, party pieces and secrets—the only testament of these tortured and murdered people—living on only in mutilated, appropriated form.

As nightmare fuel goes, this is pretty powerful stuff. In wider context of memory and genocide, it hits even harder. (The fact that Braun feels neither remorse nor revulsion when he looks back on his former career—he believes to the end that he was doing valuable scientific work for his country and resents a former assistant's description of him as "vain, ruthless . . . and self-centred"; his last surprising moment of guilt has to do with his treatment of Helen, who survives this story absolutely no thanks to Braun—incidentally puts paid to the idea that the novel is somehow going soft on the Nazis.) But there is one especial jolt saved for the reader familiar with the author's biography, which in 1966 would have comprised a limited number of acquaintances and relatives at best; I can't decide if I should describe it as an Easter egg or a sucker punch.

In the very last pages of the book, we discover along with a horrified Helen that not only is everything she ever heard of Braun's past (beyond the core fact that he came from Germany) parasitically fabricated, those tales she so loved of Paris in the 1930's are the memories of one experimental subject in particular, the man known only as "Patient 92." The investigator from the Z Commission slides the translated notebook across her hospital bed to prove it to her: "You'll find it all there. The love-affair with the nightclub manager's wife, the shooting in the club . . . did he tell you about the one-legged Frenchman who profited from his missing leg to get ahead in queues? It would be funny, if it were not so tragic." I can't speak to the affair and the shooting, but the rest of the memories are Pressburger's own. The story of the spacious flat being rented out cheap in the wake of a brutal murder, the story of hiding glass pearls inside the kind of small green oyster called portugaise as a treat for guests to discover, the story of the disabled veteran who helped him queue-jump his way to a residence permit from the Préfecture, the story of the fly-by-night bank that paid out double for fear of being turned in, even the story of the frantic night train from Berlin to Paris on a passport that was almost as perilous to acquire as to use, I read them all last week in Macdonald's Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter (1994) and recognized them when they went by in the text of The Glass Pearls, ostensibly ascribed to Dr. Otto Reitmüller, Karl Braun. The author's true double in the novel is not the mild-mannered Nazi, but his nameless victim, the "poor young Jewish photographer" who—like his creator—managed to get out of Germany at the last minute in 1933, but never—unlike his creator—made it on to England. "He was caught . . . in Paris when France was overrun. They carried him off to Wittau concentration camp . . . [He] died—somewhere on page 183. After the third operation."

Pressburger was the only survivor of his immediate family. His mother died in Auschwitz—he never forgave himself for not being able to get her to England in 1937, on his one return visit to Hungary that became so painful in retrospect, he would later deny the trip had ever taken place. "Of the twenty or so cousins, uncles and aunts who lived in and around Subotica and Bačka Topola," Macdonald writes in his biography of Pressburger, "only three survived . . . The only other surviving members of the family living in Eastern Europe are in Budapest . . . [and] have changed their name from Pressburger to Péteri." As of 1992, there were still Jews in Emeric's home town of Miskolc, but not enough of a Jewish community to support a synagogue or offer any memories of Gizella Pressburger née Wichs, last known address Horváth Lajos utca 26; Macdonald had to resort to deportation records to confirm his great-grandmother's fate. Discussing The Glass Pearls, he identifies his grandfather's assignation of his own history to a Nazi perpetrator as a form of survivor guilt: "Could it be that as a survivor he somehow felt implicated in the crimes, felt he had not done all that he could to stop them?" That seems plausible to me, but it also feels like an acknowledgement of alternate history, how easily things could have fallen out so that he did not survive. Pressburger left Germany in the spring of 1933 because he was in danger of his life as a Jewish screenwriter recently purged from Ufa and under surveillance from the Gestapo, but he left Paris in the fall of 1935 because his career in French cinema wasn't working out. Had he found more of a community there, had his films supported him better, had he not wanted to improve his English, he might well have stayed in France until it was suddenly too late, Germany had come to take him back. It happened to Kurt Gerron, whom Pressburger had known in Berlin and worked with briefly in Paris: first Westerbork, then Terezín, then Auschwitz. Otto Reitmüller only survives to become Karl Braun through a bitter-humored fluke of fate—the telegram that summons him back to Wittau, inadvertently to escape the air-raid that claims the lives of his family, describes what looks like a breakthrough in the case of the dying Patient 92. Toward the end of his life, Macdonald relates, Pressburger was "forever haunted by the thought of being chased by Nazis," in one horrifying extreme of pain and dementia mistaking the paramedics taking him to hospital for camp guards "taking him to the gas chamber." The Glass Pearls is haunted by its author's own ghost.

There are other reasons to take it seriously as a Holocaust novel—the differing perspectives offered by Braun's flatmates Leslie Strohmayer and Jaroslav Kolm, the evidence that people were already worrying about the failure of historical memory barely twenty years after the war. "Perhaps nowadays they treated such cases as routine. The war, the Nazis, the camps, War Criminals were old hat. To everybody under thirty, the whole period must appear as mythical as the Boer War." (Did I mention we had neo-Nazis in Boston over the weekend? They held a rally on the Common. It was apparently a fairly pathetic rally, which I am not sorry to hear, but they brought their Kriegsmarine cosplay and their internet memes and trust me, this stuff is not old hat to me right now. To be honest, it wasn't even before we had quite so many homegrown fascists in the news.) It is also simply a very good novel, in terms of character study and in terms of prose. English may have been Pressburger's fifth or sixth language, but he puts it together beautifully, plain-spoken and poetic by the turns it needs. I haven't re-read it with an eye to his scripts, but I am sure it would reward consideration in that direction. At the moment, I am going to shower and see what I can do about getting over this cold. I can't do anything about getting over the haunting, except remember, and make sure it's tribute, not theft.