In his biography of Franz Kafka , Max Brod declared that his friend never wrote a “single word” that was not “infused with a special magic charm.” Ever since the posthumous publication of Kafka’s work , work that only saw the light of day because of Brod’s refusal to carry out Kafka’s request to burn his manuscripts after his death, generations of readers have pored over the writer’s every word, both to be bewitched by those magic charms and to search for meaning in them.
For Kafka confounds, and we delight in his many ambiguities and absurdities. Why is Josef K. arrested one morning in The Trial? Why has Gregor Samsa transformed into a monstrous insect in The Metamorphosis? And why isn’t K. accepted in the village or admitted to the eponymous building in The Castle? We follow Kafka’s condemned men and lost souls as they wander and blunder through nightmarish, labyrinthine worlds of forbidding authorities and murky institutions, wrestling with arbitrary rules , cruel judgments, maddening bureaucracies, and hostile forces beyond their control. We try to comprehend his protagonists’ predicaments and often end up just as thwarted as they do.
Kafka is open to different interpretations . For some, his novels and stories are funhouse mirrors offering warped reflections. For others, they are lenses to examine common concerns and modern anxieties. Some claim his tales grimly depict guilt, punishment, despair, alienation, and struggle. Others consider them blackly comic farces. One thing most admirers can agree on is that Kafka’s self-styled “scribblings,” whether lucid or opaque, have force and heft. As he once wrote to a friend: “If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?”
A century on from Kafka’s death at the age of 40 comes a new study of this singular author’s life, oeuvre, and far-reaching influence. Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka is, mercifully, no conventional biography. We don’t need one: Reiner Stach’s monumental three-volume Kafka will remain definitive for quite some time. Instead, this new book by Oxford academic Karolina Watroba takes a novel approach by exploring how Kafka became Kafka and why his writings have resonated with so many people. To learn more about him and understand his readers’ responses to him, Watroba embarks on a bold and lively fact-finding quest that comprises travels across Europe, virtual trips beyond, and deep dives into the pages of his work.
Watroba’s journey begins in Oxford, home to the majority of Kafka’s surviving manuscripts. After perusing these so-called “celebrity items” in the Bodleian Library’s collection, she describes how, in 1961, Malcolm Pasley, a British aristocrat, picked up Kafka’s manuscripts from a bank vault in Zurich and drove them to Oxford. Watroba then reveals the way The Metamorphosis can be repurposed or reevaluated to chime with or make sense of contemporary crises and upheavals. She reread the book during lockdown and traces parallels between her plight and that of Gregor Samsa. Finally, she analyzes Ian McEwan’s 2019 novella The Cockroach, a Kafka-inspired reaction to Brexit, and argues that it is ample proof that “Kafka still matters today.”
Watroba’s chapter on Berlin contains a fascinating section on the complexity of Kafka’s linguistic and cultural identity. He was born in Prague, and he wrote in German, but he can’t be pinned down as Czech or German. “Even calling Kafka a German-speaking Jew,” Watroba writes, “is more of an approximation than the full story,” as he studied Hebrew and was familiar with Yiddish but wasn’t a practicing Jew. Watroba points out that his composite identity vexed him. “Am I circus rider on 2 horses?” he asked in a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer. On a visit to his house in Berlin, Watroba notes a plaque that describes him as Austrian. On a pilgrimage to the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague, she finds the inscription on his gravestone in Hebrew and German.
While in Prague, Watroba retraces Kafka’s footsteps, taking stock of the “touristic commodification” of him. This ranges from intriguing museums, statues, monuments, and a huge revolving head installation outside a shopping mall, to the maligned World of Franz Kafka (billed, laughably, not as an exhibition but rather an “experience”) and cheap merchandise from souvenir stores. This section is at its best when Watroba employs city landmarks as springboards to wider and more interesting discussion points. A commemorative plaque from 1965 leads to a brief history of Kafka’s rediscovery in Communist Czechoslovakia after being initially dismissed by one Soviet critic as a “bourgeois fashion which will pass.” A bridge Kafka could see from his bedroom window prompts a dissection of his short yet seminal story “The Judgment,” followed by scrutiny of his strained relationship with his father.
In another chapter, Watroba thrills at being given access to Kafka’s as-yet unpublished Hebrew notebooks. Among her findings is a loose page containing a letter Kafka penned to his teacher in 1923. There is a sprightliness in his tone as he highlights the “chaos” he feels when waiting for an important letter, but it is offset by a note of poignancy: “It’s a wonder that nobody turns to ash earlier than they actually do,” writes a man who was already dying from tuberculosis.
Watroba’s book has the odd flaw. Some of her sleuthwork is guesswork: Not every reader will be as excited as she is at establishing a “putative connection” between Kafka and another writer he may or may not have read. In addition, Watroba’s field trips to places Kafka lived or visited don’t always yield insightful results. She sits in one Prague café Kafka frequented and then in another he possibly went to and each time brings nothing new to the table. We try in vain to share her amazement that someone called Kafka lives in the building where she is staying or her amusement at witnessing a flock of jackdaws, as the Czech word for jackdaw is “kavka.”
Otherwise, Metamorphoses is astute and entertaining. Watroba serves up a winning blend of absorbing travelogue and rigorous inquiry. She excels with her forensic close readings and her unique take on the oft-used and much-misapplied term “Kafkaesque.” In her last section, she goes off the beaten track and skillfully demonstrates how Kafka’s influence has spread to South Korea, with various works informing Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film Oldboy and Han Kang’s 2016 International Booker prize-winner The Vegetarian.
Watroba knows her limits: She doesn’t set out to demystify Kafka or decode his enigmatic writings. Nevertheless, by engaging with him and searching for his “afterlives,” she brings him into sharper focus. He is, for her, “the patron saint of creativity,” whose stories “cannot be ever fully explained or assimilated but can be unfolded and refolded in ever new combinations and constellations.” Kafka’s work gives us a whole new way of seeing the world. Watroba’s book gives us a whole new way of seeing Kafka.
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Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
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