The narrator reacts to these largely self-inflicted misfortunes with a strange passivity: Is he following some logic of allegory? Or is he merely losing his mind? The string of puzzling decisions and improbable encounters can be frustrating. I awaited a disclosure that would either clarify the narrator’s actions—like the sin revealed at the end of Teju Cole’s “Open City”—or push the book into the realm of existential fable, like Samuel Beckett’s “Molloy.” Instead, Binyam walks a tightrope between the two. At times, the book adheres a little too stringently to the rules of its own formal game, though its unrelieved tensions are also a critique of its genre’s easy epiphanies.