THE LUNEBURG VARIATION.<i> By Paolo Maurensig</i> .<i> Translated from the Italian by Jon Rothschild</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 140 pp., $19 </i> BY MELVIN JULES BUKIET

Mystery novels frequently posit the deadly seriousness of ostensible games, but more often than not such novels’ message is a ham-fisted red herring; the game itself is what motivates the writer. Depending on the plot’s elegance or lack thereof, the book satisfies or disappoints an audience. Italian author Paolo Maurensig’s remarkable first novel, “The Luneburg Variation,” inverts that tired formula by emphasizing the game--in this case, chess--and allowing his far deeper moral concerns to reveal themselves only toward the end game.

In the first two pages, we find out that Dieter Frisch, a prosperous Munich businessman, has been shot dead beside a topiary chess set at the center of a garden labyrinth behind his country house. Perhaps Frisch has killed himself; perhaps he’s been murdered. But after this short introduction that implies a more or less common whodunit to follow, the book whisks back in time, sliding into two lengthy monologues as smoothly as the closely watched train in which Frisch has traveled. The first is addressed directly to Frisch by a haggard young man who intrudes into his compartment and the second to us by a sepulchral voice that might or might not literally be riding along the same tracks. With perfect literary balance, the twin narrators, 20-ish Hans Mayer and his elderly mentor, Tabori, recount their most vital earthly passion: chess.

For Tabori, this passion is inherited; for Mayer, inspired, yet both spend their lives in grueling training to succeed at the highest levels of a game that precludes all other concerns. Obsessed with this “world of pure mental energy” where “[a]nything that fell short of perfection was error,” Mayer and Tabori inhabit a quaintly archaic universe of shabby clubs and internecine competitions until the brute knock of reality compels them to look outside their rarefied domain. Then chess leaps off its 64 black and white squares and becomes the motive for murder and also the means.

In this sinister aspect, as well as in its intellectual rigor and mystical potency, “The Luneburg Variation” recalls Jorge Luis Borges’ great story, “Death and the Compass,” wherein a hunter and his human quarry similarly converge, and as happens in Borges’ tale, the story within “The Luneburg Variation” transcends the lives of its individual characters to suggest a vast and tragic sense of fate. But how does one respond? The answer, Maurensig suggests, can be found in how one plays chess. For some the game is an art, for some a craft and for others it’s sheer mortal combat whose only goal is the annihilation of the opponent.

Frisch, once a chess master of the highest rank, plays a stolid, academic game, yet he is forced by his adversary to counter a radical departure from tradition, the variation of the title, an apparently irrational sacrifice of the knight that throws the entire board into chaos. And just as this man who has “a horror of anything that wasn’t logical and linear” must deal with the mad gambit, likewise his opponent must resort to this shockingly self-destructive maneuver as a response to the dominant powers that Frisch represents.

A reader needn’t be adept at the game to understand what lies beneath these specific tactics and strategies. Maurensig’s philosophical aplomb under the stress of the duel also evokes another Italian author, Primo Levi. Fascinating as chess may be, “The Luneberg Variation” raises the stakes into another realm by adding one more awful and awesome element to the narrative mix. By the end, hints and circumstances have already led us to expect that the particular match executed on these pages acquires its spooky depths from the same historical material that haunted Levi throughout his sad, luminous career: the Holocaust. Events of the mid-century that don’t begin to resemble a game have led with terrifying inevitability to this pleasant passenger train that echoes the rattle of a distant cattle car.

Beyond the memoiristic chronicles of survivors such as Levi and the legacy they have passed down to their second-generation literary offspring, the Holocaust has inspired more and more books by authors with no genetic attachment to the most extreme circumstances of our time. William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” Pat Conroy’s insipid “Beach Music” and Caryl Phillips’ recent “The Nature of Blood” have all appropriated the subject’s intrinsic drama, some to genuine and others to spurious effect. Maurensig, however, grasps the human dilemma of the Holocaust in a way that practically no other writer has. Rather than wallow in the easy, shocking details (his war scenes are mostly synopses), he’s allowed the complex image of chess to serve as a metaphor for all manner of conduct during an era when 6 million lives were taken as absolutely as captured pawns from a game board. In these insane circumstances, “The Luneburg Variation” implies that an insane maneuver may be the only possible move.

The resulting novel is a masterpiece of psychological acumen as well as a profound metaphysical thriller about vengeance and justice.

Maurensig was born during World War II and published this book when he has 54, as if it had been burning like a brand under his skin for half a century. I don’t know whether he was a Jewish infant whose parents were in hiding during World War II or a happy Italian baby toddling about the streets of Rome, but he’s produced a volume that angles into the heart of the great sorrow of the century. By combining chess and genocide, Maurensig explores the inexplicable variations of human behavior, and whether he actually plays the game or not, the man is assuredly a master.