Pavel Richter, the meek yet oddly alluring protagonist of Dan Vyleta’s debut novel, seems to have an innate talent for suffering. A former American G.I., Pavel is still living in Berlin two years after the end of the Second World War. The ruined city is in the grips of a gruelling, all-pervasive cold snap when Pavel, holed up in his flat with an excruciating kidney infection, is visited by an old army pal who’s looking for somewhere to stash the mangled corpse of a frozen midget. Two days later, Pavel’s friend is dead, and Pavel is embroiled in an intrigue that implicates both his well-meaning but inept nurse, Anders, and Sonia, the whore with whom he shares a tentative kind of love.

Pavel & I is a highly stylized thriller that depicts postwar Berlin as a divided city in perpetual brownout, its inhabitants frostbitten and half-starved, the ground too hard to bury the dead. (According to Vyleta, a historian who teaches at the University of Alberta, much of the grisly ambience is drawn from fact.) Even Sonia’s pet, a degenerate circus monkey that has “bowel movements like a toddler,” is a figure of pathos.

As the story unspools, its narrator, Peterson – little more than an occasional “I” in the first 100 or so pages – steps out from behind his disinterested façade. Drawn in by Pavel’s elusive charms, Peterson, a ruthless interrogator who has a taste for Dickens and Dostoevsky, foregoes the standard operating procedure of his profession (“the usual rigamarole of food deprivation and bright shining lights”). All he wants, he tells Pavel, “is for us to talk like men” about “all those thoughts and experiences a man shuts up in his chest and gags on for half a life.” It’s a deeply ironic premise, a torturer with a tortured soul, and it speaks to Vyleta’s mastery that it comes off as entirely natural.

Pavel & I will inevitably earn comparisons to Graham Greene’s The Third Man, which also explores the nonchalant brutality of the postwar era, but its arch musings on the art of story also place it in the company of Paul Auster’s novels. Pavel & I is a stunning debut.