Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (1968)

This won some big prize or other when it first came out, but today nobody seems to remember it. Steps gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.