This is not the book for you if you need a plot with classic climax and denouement, or if you require a likable main character. First-time novelist Chloe Aridjis has daringly followed the tradition created by W.G. Sebald, whose unclassifiable "novels" move restless and lonely travelers through terrain saturated with melancholy history.

Tatiana, a young Mexican Jewish woman (why Mexican?), has lived in Berlin for five years, migrating from one apartment and dead-end job to another. She is an eccentric, rather churlish woman who possesses no friends and a rather unstable mental state. She spends her free time wandering around Berlin's various neighborhoods or riding the S-Bahn, whose automated voice announcing the stops she finds curiously reassuring.

The real protagonist of the novel is the city of Berlin, both the brash, prosperous modern city and the unshakable revenant of its Nazi and Stasi past. Attending a party in the old post office, Tatiana is shown the underground bowling alley used by Nazi officers and/or officials of the former GDR. Her new employer, Dr. Friedrich Weiss, Berlin's preeminent historian, angrily points out the tower that once concealed torture chambers. Tatiana herself is haunted by a disturbing memory. As a teenager on a family visit to the city, she had found herself in a subway facing an old crone whom she became convinced was really Adolf Hitler, all the more when the woman exits, accompanied by what seem to be four burly bodyguards.

Now she spends part of each week transcribing Weiss' essays, mixing memoir with history. One day he sends her to interview a man named Jonas Krantz. As a child in East Germany he and other children had drawn pictures, now stored in the city archives, that tried to imagine the other side of the Berlin Wall. The 6-year-old Jonas had drawn a family of ants crawling under the 155-kilometer long Wall to freedom.

The adult Jonas is a meteorologist specializing in clouds. Why clouds? "The main reason was -- or is -- the message they offer: All structures are collapsible" -- like, the reader is invited to add, the city's authoritarian regimes. Also, clouds live or die at the mercy of arbitrary air currents, again, like the unpredictable decisions of dictators. I found the metaphorical use of clouds rather a stretch. I was also unpersuaded by a scene in which, lost one night, Tatiana and Weiss are barely saved from a pair of thugs by a mystical fog that completely blinds the city.

Berlin remains somewhat of an abstraction. If you don't already know the city, you won't understand what the names of its neighborhoods represent. The main reason to read this book is for its intelligence, its melancholy lyricism and its precise observations of people, as when Tatiana watches a "repellently thin man" in the gym: "His shoulders jutted out like the ends of a metal hanger, and he looked as though a giant had seized him by the head and toes and gnawed him down like corn on the cob."

Brigitte Frase also reviews books for the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Minneapolis.