Book review: Kafka in Pieces, By Colin Laurel

By Dilip -

The Lost Writings by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann   THE UNFINISHED DRAFT OF THE CASTLE, Franz Kafka’s third and final novel, ends mid-sentence. But when the manuscript made its initial entree into the world, the text had been edited into completion. Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, who prepared the original 1926 edition, later reflected that his “aim was to present in accessible form an unconventional, disturbing work which had not been quite finished: thus every effort was made to avoid anything that might have emphasized its fragmentary state.” 

To accomplish this obfuscation of the novel’s incomplete form, Brod redacted nearly a fifth of the text. He eventually thought better of the choice, and in the second edition restored most of what he’d cut - but by then, his success at attracting interest in Kafka’s work had led to its placement on the Nazis’ “List of Harmful and Undesirable Literature.” This prevented the more faithful edition from reaching a wide German audience until the fall of the Reich. Meanwhile, Kafka’s readership grew abroad thanks to the 1930 English translations by Willa and Edwin Muir, who based their rendering of The Castle on Brod’s original edition - presenting the novel not as a fragment, but as a completed whole.

The state in which Kafka left The Castle is representative of the condition of his entire oeuvre. During his life, he published a few stories in periodicals, released one collection of fiction, and prepared another that appeared only posthumously. But he left behind the vast majority of his work incomplete - infamously, with a note beseeching Brod to burn every word. Brod approached the other novels he declined to destroy much as he did The Castle, omitting unfinished chapters from The Trial and altering the ending of Kafka’s first novel, The Man Who Disappeared, which he renamed Amerika. As for the reams of stories and aphorisms, Brod bestowed titles on many pieces that lacked them and amended aborted conclusions.

Over the intervening decades, generations of scholars and translators have contested the comparatively polished Kafka that Brod constructed….

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