Small, quiet countries are rarely considered excellent Petri-dishes for apocalyptic scenarios. This makes sense: We like our apocalypses with a side of screaming. But it is only in these countries — such as the oppressively sunny Norwegian climes of Willem Frederik Hermans’s masterly “Beyond Sleep” (Overlook Press, 308 pages, $27.95) — that one man’s failure can so portentously unfold into a parable about the futility of mankind.

The man in question is Alfred Issendorf, a Dutch Ph.D. candidate in geology who’s invested all his insecurities — personal and professional — in the grandiose idea that certain craters in Northern Norway are actually meteor holes. “I get palpitations just thinking about it,” he admits in a typically endearing fashion. His companions — three Norwegian scientists with divergent research goals — are more skeptical; they barely tolerate Alfred’s ineptitude (he gets his socks wet and his right knee hideously swollen) as they trudge through icy streams and swarms of mosquitoes into sleepless, sunlit nights.

Conversation is crucial fuel for such journeys, and here it sizzles and entertains — full of pretension, pettiness, hilarity, and bitter scientific trivia. A defense of the theory that man recursively created the entire universe, for example, ends with the rhetorical question “Siamese twins … have babies with two navels. Did you know that?” and peals of laughter. In harsh weather, the four men rhapsodize about Sherpas carrying their lazy sahibs to mountaineering nirvana.

Physical danger and silence, however, are always closing in. The short, jumpy paragraphs quickly take on the aspect of log entries in the diary of a jinxed expedition. Pages before Alfred foolishly separates from his last remaining companion (the other two have peeled off after a confrontation), he thinks: “Sweet Jesus, I’m scared. Even if I fell into the ravine and got killed, I’d still be mortified, albeit posthumously.”

Not only is this hilarious and disarming — note the crackling dryness of “albeit” — but it captures Alfred’s pathological desire to be remembered. Sadly, he is a man in over his head and knows it. He’s too polite, anxious, and deferential. Science for him is a genetic imperative — he wishes to uphold the memory of his father, a botanist who fell to his death, “a victim of science.” This thinking, in turn, encourages solipsism; he can recount the exact airspeed required to sound a note on a flute not because he is a “promising young scientist” (his own ironic explanation), but because he often regrets not having become a professional flautist. “Rarely if ever do scientists spend their days in the company of people who could write their biographies” is one of his lasting laments.

This sentence is also a moment of authorial intrusion: We are being called on to appreciate this masterpiece of scientific pettiness, but do we really need Hermans to lead the applause? Perhaps. Much of the book is a treatise on being a minor man in a minor country seeking a minor victory. “We’re always more inclined to believe a foreigner than a Norwegian,” says one character, summing up his nation’s cynicism (elsewhere, Norwegians apologize profusely for the lack of alcohol and striptease joints in their country). Alfred, crazed by disappointment and desertion during the trek, suspects his companions of sabotaging his mission simply because he is Dutch and they are not. Such infighting is worse because it occurs in the looming shadow of American progress; Europeans have lost faith in their own intelligence. As the lone American in the novel — a beautiful music critic who tries to seduce Alfred — puts it: “It’s so incredibly sad to see all those kids busting their guts for the sake of mere imitation.”

Incredibly sad, too, that a true original such as “Beyond Sleep,” first published in the Netherlands in 1966, has taken 40 years to travel west. Hermans died in 1995 and is a sardonic and brilliant writer. He knows exactly what his characters want and exactly when and how it must be denied to them. In the opening sequence, when Alfred asks a half-blind Norwegian professor for aerial photographs, he is berated for the crime of having trained in a “tiny, flat country of mud and clay without a single mountain.”

Even more impressive is Hermans’s confidence in subverting our expectations; he addicts us to his pessimistic humor and then cuts the supply. Thus, when Alfred finds himself lost — sans compass, sans watch, sans food, his face ravaged by mosquito bites, dying from lack of sleep — our desire for leavening hysteria is stubbornly repealed with earnest meditations on death. Which is why, suddenly, we want Alfred to succeed. We want badly for him to find his companions and civilization and his blasted meteors if only so that the general pettiness can proceed — which is a gloomy and apocalyptic thought in its own right.

Mr. Mahajan is a writer living in Manhattan. His first novel, “Family Planning,” will be published by HarperCollins next year.