A teenage boy in the West might keep some soft porn under his mattress. Life was different for the young Pankaj Mishra. "For years, I had felt a small thrill at the sight of the sentence, 'I read all morning.'"

He grew up in an India that was distasteful to him. In Delhi, he deplored "the hollowness of the city's promise and the mean anonymity of the lives it contained."

In 1992, Mr. Mishra abandoned the plains of India for the former British hill station of Simla, hoping to study and write. The colonial charm he was seeking was gone, wiped out by "a four-decade-long socialist torpor." Chance led him instead to a nearby village and an affordable cottage.

Now he could fulfill that boyhood dream of reading all day. Settled into the foothills of the Himalayas, his ambition to write the life story of the Buddha remained as close and as distant as the largest mountains. The Buddha's life story does eventually fuel this book-with the author's own story inserted as a parallel narrative strand. Mr. Mishra had read the accounts of European travelers, and "envied their ability to insert their personal being into the impersonal flow of events."

In the Buddhist philosophy he methodically examines, one learns that envy entails a karmic return. Near the close of the book, Mr. Mishra looks back at the versions of himself he's presented and comments: "In few of these restless, grasping selves … could I find as much as a trace of humility, or compassion." Such is the pain of that personal insight, such is the frequency and frankness with which Mr. Mishra displays his distaste for the people he meets, it seems fairer not to further unravel this thread of his book.

However, let me note the peculiar linguistic structure Mr. Mishra builds for his personal narrative. I haven't encountered a more Edwardian style since Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, almost every noun attached to an adjective and few verbs unadorned. He can surprise with the beauty of a sentence: "Naked children floated paper boats in the larger potholes on the road; mud draped their brown legs as cleanly as breeches." Then almost immediately the adjectives and adverbs crowd in again.

An End to Suffering is in its prime when Mr. Mishra is in pure storytelling mode, which he sustains throughout his detailed and informed account of the Buddha's life.

But before that account starts-and as soon as it is over-the book gets tangled in the author's wish that the Buddha "had founded, like Descartes, a tradition of scientific enquiry." We are danced through a dizzying and often numbing series of philosophical vignettes that can be tangential at best to the Buddha story. Nietzsche, Proust, Oscar Wilde, Tagore, Ashoka, Alexander the Great, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Marx, Rousseau-a motley crew trips across these pages, keeping the Buddha on his toes. Thrown together, their ideas inform and resist each other in a way that strangely simplifies the complexities of our 21st-century perspective.

Mr. Mishra's Buddha is rendered distinct by an opening statement: "Clearly, the Buddha had been more of a trenchant thinker and psychologist than a religious figure." For a Buddha written with sympathy for the man's spiritual dimension, try Karen Armstrong's fine Buddha (2001). Mr. Mishra prefers the Buddha of action to the mystical Buddha of contemplation. He tells how the original Buddhist word for meditation, bhavana, is not about sitting but "means culture or development … the creation of a wholesome climate through constant awareness." Though he gives a clear exposition of a Buddhist sangha or community, he can't stand the company of the San Francisco Zen sitting group he briefly joins, and he has even less patience when it comes to meditating alone. Descartes' dictum "I think therefore I am," Mr. Mishra tells us, once "expressed all that then seemed holy to me: individuality, the life of the mind."

Through the horrors of succeeding millennia, through the miasma of supernatural, misguided and demagogic religions, the Buddha slowly asserted his authority as the supreme distiller of self-knowledge. In 2001, Mr. Mishra attended a conference of 200,000 young radical Islamists near the border with Afghanistan; he came to be "saddened to think of the human waste they represented." "What did the Buddha, who had lived in a simpler time, have to offer people fighting political oppression, social and economic injustice, and environmental destruction?" His answer to these trenchant questions came in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers (which he saw burn and collapse on an Indian peasant neighbor's black-and-white TV). He repeats "what the Buddha had stressed to the helpless people caught in the chaos of his own time: how the mind, where desire, hatred and delusion run rampant … is also the place-the only place-where human beings can have full control over their lives."

With that knowledge in place, Mr. Mishra began to write about the Buddha. The writing process must have been a form of meditation, for though the focus wanders elsewhere in the book, the Buddha's story comes through with true clarity. The welter of thought that surrounds it might drive any true Buddhist to his own form of meditation, in order to clear the mind. Which is surely well and good.

Martin Goodman is the author of On Sacred Mountains (Heart of Albion).

I took a gypsy cab from Brooklyn to J.F.K. the other day. As the '94 Lincoln spilled fumes into its interior, the driver waved his arms and kept turning to tell me stories. New York blazed past the windows while the driver's voice spun us both to his homeland of Jordan. Those vivid New York details outside my cab did not illustrate the driver's story. They illustrated his displacement.

This kind of displacement has become normal to us. It's the subject of Nella Bielski's The Year Is '42, a confused but ultimately moving novel that reads at first like the genealogies of a Tolstoy saga compacted into a Proustian salon and delivered in a stutter of sentences. Ms. Bielski now lives in Paris and writes in French, but not till she brings her novel to her homeland of Ukraine does its true story finally appear.

The novel opens in the bath of Karl Mazinger, a civilized German officer in occupied Paris. Aged 48, Karl's Iron Cross was earned in the trenches of the earlier war. War in The Year Is '42 is curiously distant. Protagonists work as translators rather than go into battle. No one is afflicted by siege or air strikes.

Characters speak in an undifferentiated staccato style that is the overall tone of the book. Tenses shift between present, past and future without any apparent structural logic. As a novel it seems a mess, because it follows a filmic rather than a novelistic technique. Fix a camera on the shoulder of Karl, provide a voice-over of his thoughts, and you have an angle that takes you through the opening sections. It's tempting to presume that characters enter a novel in order to play a part. The parts in The Year Is '42 are mostly walk-ons, so don't bother growing attached to them. Karl makes love to a young Madeleine, bids hello to a flower-seller, is served a drink by a bisexual barman, and leaves them all behind.

A missing Frenchman was important in Karl's quixotic earlier life, and so we learn about the time that "He and Karl were watching a sunset together in Tibet. Strange, he said, the rose color is a special pink, the pink of Toulouse. The Frenchman's passion for ships and planes had, by this time, extended to water fountains and magnolias."

I read this paragraph with a weary sigh. How the hell did we get to Tibet? Who gives a damn about an elusive Frenchman's shifting passions? Spare me this welter of unrelated detail and random association. Get me out of here!

Ms. Bielski obliges. As we move to Karl's home in Saxony, we trip into a le Carré–style espionage thriller for a moment-a glancing moment. Though Karl's friend and neighbor Hans Bielenberg is a spy, we soon abandon pursuit of his activities. Hans acts as a counter for Karl, who disapproves of the war yet could never betray his country.

Good Germans are rare in non-German tales of the war. When Wladyslaw Szpilman first published The Pianist, his account of surviving the Holocaust in Warsaw, the nationality of the man who saved him was switched to Austrian: The notion of a good German was too much for readers to stomach. Karl is not quite that good German. He's a German gentleman from an earlier epoch, an officer of the traditional Wehrmacht in a world where the S.S. and the Gestapo are ascendant.

We come to see Karl more clearly as we spend time in his rural Saxony home, and it's a relief to be free of the profusion of characters that suffocated the Parisian pages. However, we can't stay here; Ms. Bielski needs us back in her Ukraine. Karl travels on a plane headed for Hitler's Ukrainian summer residence. Among the crew on board is an engineer on a mission to burn the thousands of corpses from the massacre at Baba Yar.

Now Ms. Bielski's true story begins. We meet Katia, a girl who becomes a doctor and runs a clinic on the outskirts of Kiev. Her Jewish friends, who reject her warning that a census count will become a massacre, all die in Baba Yar. However Katia's home is on the outskirts of Kiev, where the occupying German soldiers seldom appear. War once more surrounds the story but keeps its distance.

Some secret internal power guides Katia. She learned spiritual healing while she was a medical student, and she's afflicted by visions that show the love, horror and loss that will come her way.

Karl too comes her way. His body is now ravaged with a skin disease, though his face and hands remain clear. The disease is a physical manifestation of psychological damage. As Katia lays healing hands on his skin, the lives of these two disparate characters are allowed to meld.

This novel touches me with a sense of lives that flicker on while containing the tragedies of a century. In 1975, I drank a cordial in the home of an old lady in a Dresden suburb. Framed photographs of her son stood on the cabinets. He had been killed when he was my age, in a war against my country. The loss informed the rest of her life. She could only glance at me and wish me gone.

Katia's father, a musician, survives on the edge of insanity: Any reference to his losses might tip him over. Katia is a stronger being. One final vision of tragedy becomes, for her, a "spasm of light." In that moment, Karl's life enters the stream of her own history. It takes a while for The Year Is '42 to reach the story that is home, but then the atrocious whirl of the 20th century snapped millions in Europe away from their stories. For both Nella Bielski and the reader, this is a brave return.

Martin Goodman is the author of I Was Carlos Castaneda: The Afterlife Dialogues (Three Rivers Press).