'Book of Clouds' by Chloe Aridjis

Most people who travel by plane can remember the first time they broke through the clouds and gazed down on that undulant white blanket, so cleanly defined in the unfiltered sunlight. This is also the vantage from which almost all contemporary fiction is written: high above action that unfolds lucidly and deliberately for the reader. But as its title suggests, Chloe Aridjis' debut novel, "Book of Clouds," holds us in the mist, just below the point at which we can orient ourselves. Although set in post-wall Berlin, the mood is less German than Japanese: restrained, melancholy and subacid, spiked with a dreamlike urban surrealism.

Tatiana is a Jewish Mexican expatriate in her late 20s whose first year in Berlin -- "the omphalos of evil, the place where World War II had ended and, according to some, where World War III would begin" -- was an award from the Goethe Institute in Mexico City for having the highest score on its nationwide German language exam. An additional four years have passed and Tatiana remains in the city, subsisting on temp jobs, a monthly money order from her father and a vague air of expectation.

None of her brief friendships or romances have lasted and, although curious and observant, she remains unattached, even to places. She rarely phones home. About once a year, she sheds her apartment for a new one: "Spaces became too familiar, too elastic, too accommodating. Boredom and exasperation would set in. And though of course nothing really changed from one roof to another, I liked to harbor the illusion that small variations occurred within me, that with each move something was being renewed."

However alienated from others, Tatiana is deeply inhabited by her author, who moves calmly from one precinct to another in Tatiana's unusual mind. We fall on each detail with a curiosity like Tatiana's, avidly following our heroine even while she absorbs recorded announcements on the U-Bahn or sweeps her apartment floor after an August thunderstorm.

Tatiana's emotional stasis is broken by a new job transcribing tapes for an elderly historian, Doktor Friedrich Weiss, at his home in Savignyplatz. Although Weiss barely makes eye contact with Tatiana and always uses the formal "sie" when addressing her, she finds the work oddly intimate and relishes Weiss' mesmerizing voice on the tapes and her quiet hours in his study. His interest in the phenomenology of space, particularly in Berlin, taps into a subterranean current of anxiety in Tatiana. "Spaces cling to their pasts," Weiss says: