DEZSO KOSZTOLANYI DOESN'T ROLL off the Anglophonic tongue as smoothly as the names of other early twentieth-century masters like Kafka, Musil, or Mann, but perhaps it should. Kosztolányi is considered one of the greatest Hungarian writers, a virtuoso of style and control who first gained renown as a poet, journalist, and translator, and only later, in the 1920s, as a novelist. Call it the fate of so-called small languages that his books have been slow to take root in canons much beyond Hungary's borders. Kosztolányi's highly acclaimed Anna Édes finally appeared in English in 1993, Darker Muses: The Poet Nero in 1990, and Skylark in 2010. Deborah Eisenberg called Skylark "a short, perfect novel," noting that "its setting and characters are unremarkable" and "its tone is blithe," but "its effect is shattering."

This year, Kosztolányi's Kornél Esti appears in a sharp and lively translation by Bernard Adams. It is perhaps his most stunning, humorous, and heartfelt book, more a collection of stories than a novel. Originally published in 1933, only three years before his death at 51, Kornél Esti represents a marked departure from Kosztolányi's earlier work in that it blurs the line between the real and the fantastic, the everyday and the absurd: it is at once an imagined travelogue and self-styled biography of the wonderfully eccentric Kornél Esti, neatly packaged in episodic fragments.

The story begins when Esti and an unnamed narrator — a fictionalized version of Kosztolányi himself — meet up on a "mad, excited day" in spring after ten years of silence to revive their former friendship and co-write, not surprisingly, the book in your hands.

"But our styles are poles apart," Esti says to the narrator:

You've recently been favoring calm, simplicity, classical images. Not much decoration, not many words. My style, on the other hand, is still restless, untidy, congested, ornate, racy. I'm an incurable romantic. Lots of epithets, lots of images. I won't let you cut that out.

And so they settle on the terms: half Estian exuberance, half the narrator's control. "But one thing I insist on," says Esti. "Don't glue it all together with an idiotic story."

Esti is the unnamed narrator's — and thus Kosztolányi's — doppelganger: a dandyish, travel-smitten writer "born in the same year, on the same day, and at the very same hour and minute: March 29, 1885, Palm Sunday at six in the morning." At first glance, Esti could be mistaken for a spirited strain of the narrator's unfettered ego, the one who remained a bachelor, racked up debts, and traveled the world. But Esti is not an easy figure to pin down. He is a sly, chameleonic storyteller who demands the spotlight and, when taking the reins from the narrator, occasionally entreats us to imagine and re-imagine him the way he has serially stylized himself.

Thus the performance begins: the myth of Esti as told by Esti himself. Here he is 18 years old, on a train traveling to Rome:

The man who was sitting there with the Italian book in his hand was really him and not him, could be anyone he wished, because with the constant change of place, he was entering an infinite variation of possible situations, a kind of spiritual masked ball.

Esti...