Although coincidences are a regular part of daily life, coincidences in novels sometimes appear unrealistic. They call attention to the fact that everything in the story is made up to suit the author’s goals. A coincidence can rescue – or damn – a creaky plot, but just as surely it can bind narrative events together and suggest deep meaning.

Despite its comic reputation, coincidence often communicates metaphysical authority – a close relative to “God’s providence,” as William Bradford has it. That Charles Ryder happens to be stationed at Brideshead, once a bastion of elite England, now a monument to the old order’s decrepitude, suggests history’s inexorable march, as pointed up by a wry democratic God. Two new novels take up this tradition, suggesting that life’s chance encounters are the essence of destiny.

In Elie Wiesel’s “The Time of the Uprooted” (Alfred A. Knopf, 305 pages, $25), Gamaliel, a depressed Holocaust survivor living in Brooklyn, hastens to a hospital in hopes that he can communicate with a mysterious woman whose face is badly disfigured and who can hardly communicate, barely speaking only Gamaliel’s Hungarian. He suspects that she might happen to be someone from his past, the gentile cabaret singer who protected him during the war.

Musing on the meaning of this blind reunion, Gamaliel often remembers his hopes for “one day,” a day that never came – a day that would reunite all the loose threads of his life. In his own nearly senile state, he sometimes experiences memory as reality, muddling the events of his life into a fugue of coincidence.

Mr. Wiesel depicts Gamaliel’s confusion as a kind of religious vision. When he finally discovers the true identity of the woman – even closer to him than he had imagined – his experience of the coincidence sears understanding: “Gamaliel, in his turmoil, seemed abruptly to have rediscovered the energy to enter the Garden of Eden and strip the bark from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” In his euphoria, there is no distance between events: All coincide.

Mr. Wiesel’s language possesses its usual moral authority, appropriate for this unlikely story of fates intertwined, but the point here is inconclusive. Although Mr. Wiesel’s use of coincidence is profound, it is a bit too much to take. Effective coincidence must be half destiny, and half chance. The otherworldly is most convincing when it is a surprise, as demonstrated by the suspenseful machinery of horror stories.

“The Time of the Uprooted” will be liked by Mr. Wiesel’s returning admirers, but as a stand-alone effort, it reads as only an elegant recapitulation of other novels of diaspora and memory.

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John Berger’s “Here Is Where We Meet” (Pantheon, 256 pages, $24) collects fictions in which a series of ghosts prompt a character named John Berger to remember and reconsider his life. In this universe, the dead are anchored to cities that they may never have known in life, but which match their personalities. In Lisbon, John finds his mother; in Krakow he meets an old hero; in the Madrid Ritz he meets his first teacher. By coincidence, John happens to visit just the right places, as if his peregrinations were determined by the sensibilities learned from these long-dead mentors.

Mr. Berger uses a reticent prose style that leaves much unexplained, putting his coincidences in sharp profile. When John encounters Ken, who as a grown man was young John’s best friend, he finally understands their former sense of equality: “We foresaw my being an old man and his being dead, and this allowed us to be equal.”

When we revisit the past, we often remember how we once imagined the future. Thus Mr. Berger demonstrates how the passing of time invigorates our imaginations.

Mr. Berger seems to write as if the dead he describes will be reading him. Thinking of a dying professor friend, he writes, “I want Anne at this moment, this very moment, to see from her bed the red butterfly.” As the past becomes the present, so the present writing might have an afterlife. When timelines coincide, coincidence becomes one version of the meaning of life.

Mr. Berger writes with a discursive anecdotal wisdom comparable to W.G. Sebald’s less intimate but equally ghostly diversions. Mr. Berger, in many of his essays and in this book, approaches Sebald’s slow, peripatetic style, which makes the suddenness of certain encounters more believable. If Mr. Berger’s fiction has been brittle of late, “Here Is Where We Meet” is a triumphal incorporation of his essayistic thinking that demonstrates the fundamental role chance encounters play in fiction.