A German journalist, novelist, and crafter of short stories, Maxim Biller is a difficult writer in the sense that his works yield up their meaning only with focused, strenuous effort. This is the best possible sense of a term overused in critical praise, and which usually appears as cover for incomprehension in the face of pseudo-profundities and structural Baroquerie. And this species of difficulty — genuine difficulty — must play at least a part in Mr. Biller’s sad lack of reputation here: If anything engages our literary tastemakers, it’s thundering, galloping banality. Ably translated from the German by the eminent Anthea Bell, Mr. Biller’s stories are, by contrast, cruelly brief. They speak almost entirely in obliquities and allusion. The prose is pellucid, and the themes limited.

But, for all its strict economy, “Love Today” (Simon and Schuster, 216 pages, $23) is a rich and strange book. Mr. Biller was born in 1960, in Prague, to Jewish parents who emigrated to Germany two years after the suppression of Alexander Dubcek’s government and took up residence in Munich. And Mr. Biller’s stories are examinations of ambiguity and flight, the impossibility of genuine escape, of the eternal recurrence of the past. This is fitting. Mr. Biller is firmly in the line of those Central European writers who are themselves concerned with memory, history, and desire — cynical, lyrical, lustful, cerebral artists such as Milan Kundera and Joseph Roth. He shares with them, as well, a strong ambivalence about the spiritual conditions of modern life.

The opening of “The Right of Young Men,” a story about a writer named Ariel’s brief encounter with his ex-lover Miriam, captures and distills this sensibility. Its accretion of physical detail seems, at first, simple, perhaps even banal, but resolves on closer inspection into an evocation of restlessness and fragility:

It had been stormy for days. The sky was so often bright that it hurt to look up at it, and then it darkened again. The warm April wind drove garbage and broken twigs ahead of it. Sometimes you heard an open window nearby slam back against the frame with the sudden sound of breaking glass. Flights were constantly being delayed. Almost every night I was in a different hotel in a different city, and when I woke up in the morning I would cross that city off my list.

Ariel is on a book tour. As “The Right of Young Men” develops, we learn that Miriam is the child of a Holocaust survivor; that Ariel killed, in self-defense, a jealous former lover of Miriam’s; that he was tried for it, and that Miriam still cares deeply for him. All of this information is relayed in seamless, summary fashion: The whole of the story is as densely structured as a burst of memory. Yet it leads us somewhere unpredictable:

Now I went up to the front door with the key, but then I put it back in my trouser pocket and turned around, and I thought: Nothing’s simple, life in itself isn’t simple, not even sudden happiness.

So Ariel thinks as he prepares to enter his father’s house to sleep. That “sudden happiness,” powerful and causeless, transforms the story from a well-executed memoir into something more serious. Mr. Biller has gone to great pains in “The Right of Young Men” to portray Ariel as rootless and conflicted, still childish, still tangled in the snares of his own history. His intuition about sudden, apparently causeless happiness — disclosed through a scrap of inner dialogue and deployed by Mr. Biller to suggest that Ariel is, in fact, experiencing such a moment of happiness — suggests at once that we can, in fact, free ourselves of our various secret histories, but that this freedom is transient and costly.

Mr. Biller does pay a price for his brevity and the surgical economy of his means. Reading “Love Today” cover to cover induces a mild but vertiginous sense of repetition: The basic lineaments of “The Right of Young Men” — man, woman, interloper, the inescapable past — recur continually. In the volume’s best stories, this continuity matters less: The finely mapped contours of the characters, their muted but charged exchanges, weave in and out of the over-familiar elements, and fix our attention. “My Name Was Singer,” an odd, fantastic meditation on transmigrations physical and metaphysical, built around the ephemeral but time-spanning relationship of two young and sensitive people, possesses the same electrical quality as “The Right of Young Men.” And even when Mr. Biller writes, in meticulous detail, of degrading and elevating sex (in “Two Israelis in Munich” and “The Sweet Whore,” for example), he can still startle and persuade. But in the book’s lesser stories, Mr. Biller’s obsessions begin to feel emptied and sterile, placed in the service of no larger aesthetic cause.

One of the most graceful and sustained stories in the book, “Ziggy Stardust,” opens with the lines “Once I thought, I don’t want to go on. That’s some time ago now.” The words are spoken by the protagonist as he begins to enlarge upon the story of his erratic relations with Edna Radvanyi, a woman he has known since childhood. The allusion is to the oft-cited last lines of Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnameable” — another inquiry, albeit a harsher one, into the nature of compulsion and inevitability. Mr. Biller puts the phrase into the mouth of an intellectual Berlin burgher. But that brief plea — and that recognition of its futility — form the clearest definition of Mr. Biller’s philosophy. As long as we live, he implies, the past is with us, ready to assail us with no warning. And what else can we do but live?

Mr. Munson is the online editor of Commentary.