METAMORPHOSES

A celebration of Franz Kafka focusing on how his readership and reception have evolved.

The majority of Kafka’s oeuvre was published posthumously, and some important novels were never even finished. His legacy was established after his death by a widening critical readership who found his strange stories pliable enough to become a metaphor for just about anything. Today, we view his work in countless ways: surrealist, existentialist, a critique of totalitarianism, a record of the Jewish experience, even feminist social commentary. Explaining that Kafka’s stories “invite rewritings and afterlives,” Watroba, author of Mann’s Magic Mountain, aims to track their shapeshifting splendor. “As readers,” she explains, “we regularly see a reflection of our own times, our own crises, in the books we particularly value, especially those that seem pregnant with nebulous metaphorical meaning.” Watroba’s studies take the form of a travelogue as she searches for “Kafka’s metamorphoses around the world,” and she strikes a clever balance between contemporary connections and scholarly research. She combines a visit to Kafka’s manuscripts in Oxford with a discussion of Ian McEwan’s recent Brexit-themed novella The Cockroach. Watroba’s visit to Prague tracks locations from Kafka’s diaries and includes a stop at “The World of Franz Kafka, one of Prague’s lowest-rated attractions on TripAdvisor.” A section on Kafka’s Jewish roots will thrill aficionados, as Watroba translates selections from his yet-to-be-published writings in Hebrew. She ends her journey in Seoul, where she astutely considers Kafka as a “secret agent of the ‘Korean wave’” in literature and film, citing his influence in Park Chan-wook’s film Oldboy, among other works. Although some readers may lament Watroba’s circumvention of a chronological biography, it’s a pleasure to travel with her as she illuminates the global circuitry of what it means to be Kafkaesque today.

An astute modern take on Kafka’s importance, published on the centenary of his death.