In 1977, the long-unknown, just-published Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész released a slim double volume, containing the novellas “Detective Story” and “The Pathseeker,” a translation of which has just been published in its own volume (Melville House, 126 pages, $13). Mr. Kertész would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, in large part for his trilogy of “Fatelessness,” “The Failure,” and “Kaddish for a Child Unborn.” For an artist by his own admission incapable of thinking or writing about anything except Auschwitz, these two early works seem anomalous. “Detective Story” recounts insidious political brutality in an unnamed Latin American country, while “The Pathseeker” tells of a frustrated journey toward a hidden goal in an anonymous landscape (albeit one recognizable as somewhere in Central Europe). Slender though it is, “The Pathseeker” is a necessary addition to Mr. Kertész’s work in English, and should occasion thanks to both the novelist and his translator, Tim Wilkinson, who has rendered Mr. Kertész’s (famously difficult) Hungarian into a flowing, able English — as well as to Melville House’s fascinating “The Contemporary Art of the Novella” series, which rubric “The Pathseeker” falls under.

Only one figure in “The Pathseeker” has a name: Hermann, the hapless but crafty guest that the novel’s protagonist — identified as “the commissioner” — interrogates after spending the evening with him and his buxom wife. In the course of the commissioner’s oblique, forceful probing, what once appeared to be an almost comically banal evening with the European bourgeoisie soon opens into a discussion of witness, testimony, memory, and guilt, centered around a “case” that occurred in a rural town near Hermann’s residence. Following the scraps of knowledge gleaned from Hermann, the commissioner sets out — with his heel-dragging, uncomprehending wife — to revisit the scene of the case and gather evidence there.

The commissioner is hindered and deflected at every turn, by bus schedules, by the importuning of his wife, by his own doubts and his strange, constricting, private morality, by the close-mouthedness of locals and their tendency to sweep away historical debris, and by a series of unnerving events, culminating in a traffic jam as harrowing as Dante’s vision of hell, and a stranger’s seemingly pointless, sinister suicide. In the end, morally overwhelmed, the commissioner abandons his case with little fanfare and sets off with his wife on their long-promised trip to the beach.

Mr. Kertész’s prose, recursive and long-breathed, keeps pace with the circular, frustrated action of the plot. Anonymity, elliptical speech, a fluid, almost euphuistic beauty, and an obdurate refusal on Mr. Kertész’s part to concede to even the most usual desires of the reader: “The Pathseeker” might seem, in a summary treatment, like the colorless, belabored works produced by writers whose sole aim is to toy with narrative convention. But Mr. Kertész places its maddening, permanent, and eerie periphrasis in the highest possible service: moral witness. And precisely because Mr. Kertesz refuses to speak with full openness about the scenery, its history, and his protagonist’s deep and damaging relation to both, “The Pathseeker” avoids even the slightest tendency toward ethical didacticism, a great risk when writing about the Holocaust.

For that is, as intelligent readers will discern after only a few pages, the true subject of “The Pathseeker.” Or, to be more precise, it is the condition of ineffability that horror vacui gives rise to, a phenomenon summed up with callous brevity by Theodor Adorno in the statement that, after Auschwitz, all poetry is barbarism.

In spite of Adorno’s statement, which contains a condemnation not only of poetry specifically but of the capacity of imaginative literature to create meaning, to matter, in the wake of the moral crisis of the Holocaust, Mr. Kertész has devoted his life to literary chronicles of the camps and their place in the European experience, producing novels that make regular use of poetry’s desperate, direct address to convey their apocalyptic content. The true power of Mr. Kertész’s book lies in the tension between the spreading fog of the protagonist’s despair and the moments it is illuminated, however painfully:

All round was a barren empty scenery, the light thrown back by white gravel to the point of being blinding; however, of the long, flat building that, by his reckoning, ought to have been on the left and farther up, with, in its center, a high-pitched roof, rising vertically to the axis of the substructure, and with the flag above all, the flag that, at times like this, noon in summertime, would dangle limply on the mast pole (whatever flag that might be, it didn’t matter right now) — no trace of that was to be seen anywhere. Had they tricked him? Or had he gotten it wrong?

In the course of “Fatelessness,” his most well-known novel, Mr. Kertész has his narrator, the inscrutable Gyuri Köves, respond to a question about the “hell of the camps” by saying, “as far as I am concerned I could only imagine a concentration camp, since I was somewhat acquainted with what that was, but not hell.” Beneath the apparent perversity of the words lies one of Mr. Kertész’s guiding principles: To call Auschwitz hell is a moral and literary disservice, in that it betrays the intractable reality of the camps. That reality, too, can seem silently tautological, but Mr. Kertész manages to speak of it, in “Fatelessness” and in “The Pathseeker,” and even to lay bare its true aesthetic contours.

The gappy, inescapable memory of an administrative building in the summer noon, with its limp flag, a building hidden or demolished by humans, time, or the protagonist’s own faulty recollections — this dredging-up, imperfect though it may be, stands as Mr. Kertész’s protest against silence, historical and otherwise. And with the introduction of “The Pathseeker” into English, after 30 years of silence, we should pay grateful and careful attention.

Mr. Munson is online editor of Commentary.