The Spell by Hermann Broch, translated by H. F. Broch de Rotherman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22.50; 347 pp.)

The German writer Hermann Broch is best known for a trilogy of novels published in the early 1930s under the collective title of “The Sleepwalkers.” Set over 30 years--from 1888 to 1918--it chronicles, in a style ranging from realistic to fantastical to didactic, the rising passions and declining values of a German society that would end in collapse and under Nazi rule.

“The Sleepwalkers” and a later, more experimental, work, “The Death of Virgil,” have been widely admired in Europe, although less well known here. Milan Kundera praised the former as a masterpiece, and the critic George Steiner calls Broch the greatest European novelist since James Joyce.

Comparisons have been made ranking him with Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann. In bringing out his last work, “The Spell,” in fact, his publishers call it “the equal, in its way, of Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain.’ ”

A reader who approaches “The Spell”--which Broch was still revising at his death in 1951--with such an expectation, will be seriously disappointed, not to mention perplexed. There is indeed a mountain in it, but it is wrapped in mist. In a way, it is the central figure in this inflated and woolly parable, which seeks to reflect the rise of Hitler in the mass hysteria inflicted upon an Alpine village by a vicious charlatan.

The story is told by the village doctor, a one-time intellectual who, crippled by a tragic love affair, retires to the countryside. His diary tells of the arrival there one day of a stranger named Marius Ratti. Initially, the villagers mock and distrust him for his odd, Italianate look and his preaching against sex and such modern conveniences as the radio and the mechanical thresher. But Ratti, as much Tartuffe as Hitler, gradually gets them in his power.

He convinces them that the old gold mines in the mountain that towers over the village can be worked once more and make them all rich. Some of the villagers--those who live on the mountain slopes--oppose him. But, with the aid of a deformed henchman who organizes the local youth into a paramilitary gang of bully boys, Ratti uses gold-lust and his own fanatical eloquence to take possession of the village’s collective spirit.

There are mystic rites, incantatory speeches, the blood sacrifice of a village girl, and the hounding of a scapegoat in the person of the local insurance and machinery salesman. The frenzy mounts and abates, leaving a desolate silence behind.

This is the story, more or less; and here and there, Broch displays his novelist’s skill in capturing the villagers’ speech, their suspicions, their appetites. Ratti’s deformed spirit is wonderfully well captured by a derisive term used by one of the village women. She calls him “the weak one.” But the author quite fails to do what Friedrich Duerrenmatt did, for instance, in “The Visit”: make believable the debasement of a community by greed or, for that matter, what Mark Twain did in “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.”

The theme of corruption, in any event, is generally submerged by Broch’s more conspicuous preoccupations. One of these is to give a mythological setting to his story. The battle over gold mining becomes a battle between the defenders and the pillagers of the mountain, which takes on the aspect of a great Earth spirit; the representation, perhaps, of Germany itself. The defenders--notably, an old seeress named Mother Gisson and her son, Matthias--warn that the mountain must rest, and that it will take revenge on those who disturb it. It does, in fact.

More damaging than the heavy-handed insistence on myth is the author’s prose, translated by his son, H. F. Broch de Rotherman, with a faithfulness that occasionally may suggest high treason.

Broch, as has been said, was something of an experimentalist; the last part of “The Sleepwalkers” contains chapters in verse. In “The Spell,” his writing is declamatory, lyrical and repetitive, replete with high-flown and sentimental descriptions of nature and cloudy philosophical passages. It is rhetoric seeking to do the work of imagination.

Here is the doctor thinking about the woman he had loved. She seemed to him “the tangible soul-filled beyond all tangibility, soul-filled each breath and each fiber of her body, soul-filled even the bones of her skeleton, radius and ulna and phalange and even her teeth. . . .”

But the narrator uses this kind of prose, not just when thinking of his mistress’ bones, but for things in general. Here is part of a sentence in which an autumn day leads to thoughts of holiness:

“Nevermore can we reach farther than to that loftily floating center in which the perceived joins with that which perceives, source of echo and counter-echo, our cognizance, divine and earthly at the same time, revealing the otherworldly in the here and now: This is the abode of the saints who live in the secular and yet have opened themselves to the divine . . . ,” and so on for 12 lines more.

This is the profundity of a swamp. And when Broch, from time to time, writes more lightly and directly, his translator maintains the feeling of a foreign language by using Germanic inversions: “Green were the patches of meadows among the stretches of snow,” or “white were the blackberry bushes.”

Hard to read is “The Spell.”