The potentially catastrophic consequences of reading Kafka
Rainer Maria Rilke’s claim that fame is the ‘sum of all misunderstandings’ is certainly true of Franz Kafka, whose life, work and reception have long been plagued by myriad misunderstandings. Despite publishing comparatively little in his all-too-short lifetime (1883-1924), Kafka gained a reputation as a writer’s writer, whose work was met with keen appreciation by, among others, Rilke, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. In Kafkaesque, which first appeared in French under the title Dix versions de Kafka, Maïa Hruska charts Kafka’s afterlife through the perspective of ten ‘first’ writer-translators. These range from luminaries such as Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz and Primo Levi to lesser known but intriguing figures such
