One thing worth remembering while reading Mariusz Szczygiel’s mordant “Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia” is that Franz Kafka was a Czech, and Mr. Szczygiel is not. He’s a Polish writer and journalist, looking with a kind of appalled fascination at his country’s southern neighbor and finding that life there can often be, well, Kafkaesque.

It turns out, Mr. Szczygiel discovers, that the Czechs even have a word, kafkarna, that they use to describe “an absurdity that is impossible to explain rationally.” Because of the long periods of totalitarianism suffered by Czechoslovakia — a country born out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I and dissolved into the Czech and Slovak republics in 1993 — the concept also has a nightmarish application, and that becomes Mr. Szczygiel’s true subject.

It is impossible not to think of “The Trial” or “The Castle” after reading this complaint Mr. Szczygiel found in the diary of Vaclav Cerny, a literary critic persecuted through 40 years of Communist rule: “In a political trial, the fact of the defendant’s birth is already a crime in itself.” Mr. Szczygiel (pronounced SHEE-gaul) seems to have interviewed hundreds of people and read countless books and documents in his efforts to track down such obscure but symbolically freighted incidents and characters, and shows a remarkable knack for ferreting out the telling detail.

“When people have to talk about Communism,” they tend to employ passive, impersonal constructions, as if they “had no influence on anything and were unwilling to take personal responsibility,” he notes in one typically observant passage. “Thus, in a situation where someone ought to say: ‘I was afraid to talk about it,’ ‘I hadn’t the courage to ask about it,’ or ‘I had no idea about it,’ they say: ‘There was no talk about it.’ ‘Nothing was known about it.’ ‘That wasn’t asked about.’ ”