Let’s say you’ve suffered some psychic trauma or experienced some brain injury and can’t form new memories. Your anterograde amnesia leaves you subject to all sorts of hoodwinking, the fruitful premise of Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori” and the 2000 film Memento that it spawned.

Now let’s say that you can’t remember faces—that, in other words, you’re afflicted with a rare neurological disorder that blocks you from forming a memory of the appearance of the people you’ve met. So it is with the protagonist of Daniel Galera’s new novel Blood-Drenched Beard, who finds something like love—“Jasmim is the first person he has ever met,” our narrator tells us, “who knows what prosopagnosia is”—as well as mystery, and murder, in a small beach town in the southern stretches of Brazil.

The story, Galera says, is grounded in reality, at least after a fashion. “I was living in São Paolo in 2007, and I decided to move to Garopaba, the fishing village where the book takes place. It was a new place for me, and a new life experience—just like my character had, only he has that little problem with memory.”

That little problem lands him in considerable difficulty. His father, dying, has told him that his grandfather came to a bad end in Garopaba, murdered by villagers for reasons that will only slowly emerge. That the old man may have had it coming is just one of the things that our nameless young hero discovers, taking his time to come to these discoveries, for Garopaba is a place where nothing much happens and certainly not much happens quickly, and the young man does much of his pondering while bobbing up and down on the waves, having taken, as Galera himself did, to the fine art of floating out in the Atlantic.

“I was pretty sure that going to Garopaba would bring me some kind of idea for a writing project,” says 35-year-old Galera. “Then I remembered a story my father had told me, years before, about something that had happened in the 1970s, when he used to go to the beach there. Someone was murdered. An outsider went to a party, somebody turned off the lights, and everybody knifed the guy. That way no one could say who the murderer was.”

It’s as if the whole village, in other words, had lost its memory, which makes the prosopagnosia aspect that Galera adds on a kind of double dose of amnesia. Of course, Galera says, the story that his father told him may or may not have been true. “It was a story somebody told him,” he says, “and somebody else told the story to the person who told it to him.”

Whatever the case, it proved a rich premise, and, Galera says, when he arrived in Garopaba, he started to retell the story to himself, arriving at a series of questions: Who could the murder victim have been? Why was he killed? Why did the villagers conspire to do him in, and in such an innovative if unpleasant way? “Slowly,” he says, “after thinking about it for a long time, and after living there in Garopaba, the story began to appear in my mind. Then all I had to do was write it down.”

As with the event his father had remembered, Galera’s elegant, decidedly postmodern mystery takes an ingenious approach to getting rid of an outsider who, simply by virtue of being rootless and without protection, is seen as dispensable. It doesn’t hurt the killers’ cause that there were no police in the town to investigate the real event, or that, in the case of the novel, the protagonist takes a maddeningly philosophical view of life as it bobs by: “I’m going to die. It doesn’t make any difference. The atoms didn’t belong to the star. My states of mind aren’t mine. And what the fuck is the mind anyway? I think it’s just a clever way to believe in a soul. It’s the leftovers of permanence that Buddhists keep stashed under their beds.” Neither does it hurt Galera’s story that with an investigator who can’t remember the faces he’s seen, there are ample opportunities for what he smilingly deems “tense situations.”

Galera, a well-published novelist in his native Brazil, is also a translator—of, among other writers, David Mitchell, whose The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet he calls “the hardest translating job I’ve ever had,” as well as Zadie Smith and John Cheever. American and British writers are well represented on reading lists and bookstore shelves in Brazil, he notes, while of course the opposite is not so true.

But, says Galera, his other three novels are now being translated into English, and if Blood-Drenched Beard is a success, then it may help lift the tide for other young Brazilian writers. Galera recommends a few in particular who are emerging in the English-language market, among them Paulo Scott, whose novel The Nowhere People received the esteemed Machado de Assis Prize on publication in Brazil, and Michel Laub’s Diary of the Fall, which Kirkus praised as “a spare and meditative story that captures the long aftereffects of tragedy.”

Blood-Drenched Beard blends some of the wistfulness of Latin American magical realism with a brooding dystopianism, an original combination that won’t prove a day at the beach for some readers, but that will attract many others, especially fans of Roberto Bolaño and, looking farther back in time, Julio Cortázar, who made inventive and imaginative games of his novels. With moments befitting both those writers, but also Alfred Hitchcock, Daniel Galera serves up a pensive, expertly written story that will leave its readers wanting more.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor at Kirkus Reviews.