Franz Kafka, a hunch-backed best friend, a violated will, an escape from Nazis, ten safe-deposit boxes spanning two countries, smuggled papers, missing letters, fifty feet of files, four Israeli lawyers, and ‘an untold number’ (40-100) of cats: the eighty-six-years-worth the characters in the journey of Kafka’s unpublished work.
In what reads like a detective story, Elif Batuman’s recent article in The New York Times, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” is a thrilling, comprehensive account of the life and work of one of history’s most mysterious writers.
Here’s the condensed version: lanky teenager Franz Kafka becomes good friends with a man named Max Brod while at law school in Prague; Brod recognizes Kafka’s genius, publishes him, worships him; Kafka dies, leaving his unpublished work to Brod with the infamous instructions that it be “burned unread;” Brod disobeys; Brod publishes a number of Kafka’s works including The Trial a year later; Brod flees Prague with the papers as Nazis close off the Czechoslovakian borders in 1939 and spends the rest of his life publishing / promoting / again worshipping Kafka; Brod has a secretary, Esther Hoffe, who might have been his lover; he bequeaths Kafka’s unpublished work to her, who in turn bequeaths it to her two daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler; Eva, who keeps many of the papers in her apartment with the hundred cats, has recently spent a good deal of time trying to find the highest bidder for parts of the collection (original manuscripts of novels, personal letters, etc.). The papers are worth millions and millions.
They are in the interest of Israel; the National Library of Israel really started to challenge Eva after she expressed interest in selling the papers to German Literary Archive in Marbach, a move that Phillip Roth pointed out as “yet another lurid Kafkaesque irony” – Kafka’s three sisters died in Nazi concentration camps. The Israeli courts are getting at the papers by challenging Brod’s original will of leaving the papers with Esther.
As Batuman writes, that Kafka’s life’s work is stuck in legal limbo, locked in volts and being fought over by teams of lawyers, is, for any Trial reader, the irony to beat all ironies.
Batuman (who this year came out with The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) paces the story magnificently. She offsets the legal detail with gorgeous simile (“A large moth circled over our heads in the light of a streetlamp, its wings flapping like some great opened-up book of magic.”), noun-choices to make any writer sigh (“…Kafka’s papers had generated decades of acrimony and become the playthings of lawyers), and succinct visual descriptions (“Two cats staggered out of a rhododendron bush, looking drunk”). The reader leaves the article with a healthy amount of facts on Kafka’s life and work without having felt like it was history lesson. We get Kafka’s height (6 feet) and weight (118 lbs) around the time of his death, his obsession with his hygiene, bowel movements, and dandruff, and just a touch of his final days with his 26-year old Galician lover, Dora Diamant.
The story becomes fleshy and bizarre; it rises out of history like one of those deep-sea creatures floating into a searchlight, spongy and alien, glowing with phosphorescence, seemingly more intelligent than us, impossibly existing in present day.
The article is folded over itself a number of times, seeded with riddles and hidden word plays. Seven pages before Batuman sees the moth’s “open-up book of magic” wings, Brod quotes for Kafka a Gustav Meyrink passage that compares “butterflies to great opened-out books of magic.” Kafka retorts with Hugo von Hoffmansthal quote: “the smell of damp flags in a hall.” That the magic-winged insect is now guarding Kafka’s papers (Batuman sees it above Eva’s apartment) is yet another point of irony – this time sharpened by Batuman’s word craft instead of the court system.
