On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. It’s hardly an event which needs its significance re-stating, but there was one outcome which has received rather less attention than the impending crisis in Europe. After the first instalments – serialised in newspapers in the summer of that year – a bizarre, flamboyant, mock-gothic novel by an unknown writer, ‘Z. Niewieski’, was forced to cease publication on 3 September.

Witold Gombrowicz, the author of The Possessed and master of Polish modernism, had penned the work under a pseudonym, and, he claimed, only for money. If that distance from the book weren’t enough, he then put an ocean between himself and the manuscript. At the end of July, just as tensions were mounting in Europe, he made the journey from Poland to Buenos Aires. He remained in Argentina until 1963 and never returned home. It wasn’t until a few days before his death in 1969, lying on his sickbed in the south of France, that he admitted to writing The Possessed – his third book, after his 1933 stories Memoirs from the Time of Immaturity and his more famous 1937 novel Ferdydurke.

The publication history of The Possessed already has all the mystery of an underground cult classic, with its fate bound up with 20th-century history and an author who attempted to disown it until the moment of his death. After the war, it wasn’t published as a (seemingly) full novel until 1973. And it wasn’t until 1986 that the last three chapters were discovered, and in 1990 that a truly complete edition appeared in print. Only this year has it been translated directly from the Polish into the English, in Antonia Lloyd-Jones’s adept, light sentences.

But the novel’s appeal goes beyond its tumultuous journey into print, however bizarre the plot sounds. A young tennis coach (whose name changes from Walczak to Leszczuk in the space of one facetious footnote – ‘what a strange coincidence!’) leaves Warsaw to teach the daughter of a bankrupt aristocrat in the Polish countryside. With a ‘bewitched’ towel, a ‘poor old’ mad prince, a sprawling castle full of art and a famous clairvoyant, the story soon hurtles down the winding stair of gothic pastiche – all ghosts, murders and terrifyingly infectious insanity.

For every moment of a heavy-handed trope (the castle has a dark secret; a scheming secretary plans to run off with the wealth), there’s one of high camp and modernity. Lloyd-Jones renders the constant expressions of despair and glee as playful ‘nooos’ and ‘wowees’. As much of the action takes place in glittering 1930s dance halls and smart tennis clubs as it does in the haunted castle.

It’s satirical pulp and, as Adam Thirlwell writes in the introduction, a ‘so-called potboiler’. But we shouldn’t simply accept Gombrowicz’s own assessment of it. This is a rough-edged comic novel of ludicrous twists and turns and moments of intriguingly artless exposition. It’s also a book engaged in curious doubles: the set pieces of dramatic action take place on a tennis court as the players have to mirror and respond to each other. Soon the shots become something more than ones merely played in a game: ‘He struck the ball as if he were hitting her.’

This image of rivals – fighting, but still enticed by one another – stalks the book, as characters find themselves alternately repulsed and aroused by their likenesses. But the ultimate tennis match is between the creaking horror of the gothic novel and the other book that haunts The Possessed: a delightfully slippery, devious work of modernism.