Volume 52, Number 2 · February 10, 2005
Kafka Up Close
By Frederick C. Crews
Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form
by Stanley Corngold
Cornell University Press, 321 pp., $45.00, $16.95 (paper)
Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka
by Stanley Corngold
Princeton University Press, 262 pp., $45.00
Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient
by Sander L. Gilman
Routledge, 328 pp., $31.95 (paper)
Kafka: Gender, Class, and Race in the Letters and Fictions
by Elizabeth Boa
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $90.00
K.
by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
Knopf, 327 pp., $25.00
When Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924 at age forty-one, he enjoyed a modest and largely local reputation. With the exception of a few renderings from German into Czech by his sometime lover Milena Jesenská, for example, not one of his works had been translated into any language. Things began to change, but still slowly, when his friend and literary executor Max Brod, making bold guesses about the intended shape and meaning of the three unfinished novels, launched Der Prozeß (The Trial) into print in 1925, followed by Das Schloß (The Castle) and Amerika in the next two years. When Willa and Edwin Muir began their influential English translations of the Brod texts with The Castle in 1930, Edwin could still report in his introduction that 'Franz Kafka's name, so far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers.'
Review, 4333 words
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