"An Unending Landscape" is a subtle, humorous, mind-bending novel about the origins and fates of three different manuscripts. The first is an autobiographical sketch concerning an Estonian writer's old schoolmate, now a government official, who is trying to recruit our narrator to spy on his fellow citizens. The second, composed by the hero of the first, is a fictionalized (and far more exciting) version of these same experiences. Finally, the self-aggrandizing hero of this second story decides to write his own novel, which seems on one hand to be a plagiarism of Chekhov's "Lady With the...