The title character of Arnon Grunberg's audacious comic novel The Jewish Messiah, Xavier Radek, is a sensitive Swiss teenager from a middle-class family with a dark history. Although the Second World War was "far, far away," his mother still refers to Adolf Hitler as "You-Know-Who" and hides, unsuccessfully, her dead father's Nazi past. While fascinated by his stormtrooper grandfather, Xavier is more obsessed with suffering: "He regarded suffering as a skill, as much a part of acquired etiquette as the proper way to eat a lobster."

Realizing that his life has brought him little opportunity to endure pain, Xavier is drawn to the Jewish people, who are, of course, experts. At a Basel synagogue, he befriends a rabbi and becomes a pal, then lover, of Awromele, the oldest of his 13 children.

In the hands a more straitlaced writer, Xavier's interest in Judaism could have been an affecting story about interfaith gay love and how a self-dramatizing teen projects his own suffering onto history. Grunberg's novel is far more audacious than that. The Jewish Messiah relies on improbable plot twists and cartoonish misunderstandings to satirize racial and religious tensions in contemporary Europe, as well as the shadow of the Holocaust.

Grunberg, the child of an Auschwitz survivor, fashions characters who aren't so much fully formed creations - unlike characters in, say, a Chekhov story, you don't imagine any of them with lives outside this book - as they are marionettes who embody gruesome dualities: Nazi and Jew, straight and gay, comforter and torturer, Messiah and destroyer.

In his efforts to become Jewish, Xavier is taken by Awromele to be circumcised. A half-blind Marxist mohel who imports kosher cheese botches the procedure, taking off one of Xavier's testicles. Xavier dubs the amputated testicle, which is blue and kept in a jar, "King David." As he does throughout the novel, Grunberg relates this episode with a faux-naive understatement.

It's in this grotesque set piece, an allusion to a widely rumoured childhood accident that might have maimed Hitler, that we see the underlying architecture of the novel. The Messiah is also You-Know-Who. We see Awromele and Xavier concoct plans to translate Mein Kampf into Yiddish. Later, Xavier begins developing, like Hitler, a small talent as a painter, as he begins a series of paintings of his mother holding King David.

As the novel progresses, the trajectory of Grunberg's outlandish plotting steepens, slipping the surly bonds of plausibility. In the final chapters, Xavier has become Israel's prime minister, King David is seen by many Jews as the Messiah, and Awromele's sexual favours are a bartering chip in negotiations with Hamas.

Romantic frustration and sexual hypocrisy form another theme that runs throughout The Jewish Messiah. Awromele continually disappoints Xavier with his philandering. (Xavier's one attempt to pay back his inconstant lover is a piece of slapstick in which he forces himself violently onto a stranger he mistakes for a terrorist.) Other side-plots include a gang of bullies who quote Kierkegaard while inflicting pain and an Egyptian falafel salesman and cocaine dealer who has his feet deep-fried by Palestinian strongmen.

Grunberg, who was born in 1971 and published his first novel at 23, is widely known in Europe for his prankish brilliance. According to his jacket biography, he's the only writer to win the Anton Wachter prize for debut fiction twice - the second time as the "mysterious Viennese writer Marek van der Jagt."

The Jewish Messiah is an exhausting performance that is not without its dead patches. In its 470 pages, you occasionally miss reading about characters you care about, plotting that takes more than glancing interest in cause and effect, and satire that hews a little closer to the world in which you live. But for the most of the book, you can't help but be amused and impressed by a writer who possesses such a complete disregard for piety, who treats tragic history not with the dewy reverence of an antiques dealer restoring a tea table, but as meat to throw into the grinder of his savage, provocative intellect and his dazzling comic sensibility.

In summing up The Jewish Messiah, I'm reminded of Awromele's ludicrously misguided assessment of Mein Kampf: "It's got pace, it's got momentum, it's full of humour, and I think the writer has a story to tell." My struggle here is not to laugh.

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver writer, His most recent book is Neil Young Nation.