Zurich

Emma Cline’s first novel, The Girls (2016), sold more hardback copies than any other debut novel published in the UK that year. It was an atmospheric treat of a book about young women in a Mansonesqe cult. Her next novel, The Guest (2023), was a haunting story about a beautiful, brittle grifter trying her luck in the Hamptons and coming unstuck. In between came Daddy (2020), a collection of short stories united by their exploration of toxic masculinity. This latest novel, Switzy, which won her her first Booker Prize longlisting, is quite a departure, in that it is about a man with dementia contemplating the end of his life. Cline is attempting something even more difficult here than producing an interesting story about a boring man in the style of, say, John Cheever.

Two books in one: you flip it over, and it becomes the other. A Winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici arrestingly puts it in the preface: ‘One day in the summer of 1917 the writer Franz Kafka woke up to find his mouth full of blood.’ (The echo of the opening line of Metamorphosis is surely deliberate.) Here, in isolation, he recuperated, or tried to. He wrote to Max Brod: ‘I’m not writing. What’s more, my will is not directed towards writing. If I could save myself... by digging holes, I would dig holes.’ Josipovici quotes this, and adds that there is a photograph of Samuel Beckett ‘doing just that’ in the second volume of his Collected Letters.