Check out this utterly fantastic story on Kafka’s unfinished manuscripts over at The Independent. Usually unfinished manuscripts lead to something as blase as Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, but the story behind Kafka’s documents is as bizarre as any of his prose.
After Kafka’s death in Vienna, his work was famously entrusted to Max Brod, a Zionist, who traded Czechoslovakia for Israel during the dawning days of World War II. He published much of Kafka’s novels but entrusted the unfinished papers to his secretary Ester Hoffe in Tel Aviv. She put them in her cat-infested basement. After her death in 2008, the unreleased papers were broken up and kept in five safe-deposit boxes in Israel and one in Germany. Israel believes the manuscripts are part of their cultural heritage and should stay within the country. Academics and Kafka fans want them released.
What say you, Rumpus readers? Are you clamoring for Kafka’s unfinished papers or does posthumous work strike you as a cash-in? Should James Joyce’s dirty letters, David Foster Wallace’s undergrad thesis, and Nabokov’s notes remain the untouched property of the dead?
3 responses
Crack those suckers open!
Put ’em on the internets! .. But really, surely something could be worked out.
Max Brod called Amerika, The Castle, and The Trial, a “trilogy of human solitude.” It was also a trilogy of unfinished novels. So if anyone’s “unfinished” work is of literary intrigue, it is Kafka’s.
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