A wandering Kafka scholar 

A multi-lingual literary scholar translated from Cracow to Oxford, Karolina Watroba travels as an eye-witness to Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Jerusalem and Seoul to discover the experiences of Franz Kafka’s real-life readers.  She contradicts herself by saying that Prague has “so utterly changed since Kafka’s time” but also that “much of the architecture has survived to this day.”  (When I visited Prague in 1982, under the Communist regime, not one of his books was available there, in either German or Czech.) 

 In Metamophoses: In Search of Franz Kafka (Profile, 2024), Watroba defines her interests and methods, studies Kafka’s reception and what his books have meant to non-academic followers.  She uses the internet to unearth ephemera: journalistic reviews, letters to authors, marginalia in books, posts on social media.  She claims, but doesn’t convincingly show, “that the best way to understand a writer is to understand his readers” (my italics).  Her book, which takes an innovative approach to the exhaustively studied Kafka, is intelligent and interesting, learned and lively, but also deeply flawed.

Though Watroba’s command of English is excellent, she has an unfortunate stylistic tic (not excised by her editors) that seems to come from elementary-school teaching or her doctoral dissertation.  As if she were insecure and afraid of losing her readers, she states over and over again what’s she’s already done and what she’s going to do, pointlessly repeating: we will see, we’re about to see, we’ve already seen; in the last chapter, in the next chapter, in chapters to come; we have now met, we have already looked at; as I explain and “let me explain what I mean by this by introducing you to.”  In this short text of 220 pages, she includes two half-page summaries of what she’s already written in this book.

Watroba indulges in many emotional effusions as she tells her readers what they ought to feel about her exciting, fascinating, thrilling, exhilarating and richly rewarding experiences in Kafkaland.  She also relies on clichés: part and parcel, the old and the new, and makes some banal comments: his “writing was indeed very special,” “Kafka’s identity and his writing are connected.”  She says it’s difficult to picture what Kafka’s gigantic insect might look like, but the entomologist and author Vladimir Nabokov published his drawi  en ng of Gregor Samsa and noted that if he’d only opened his wing case he could have flown away.

Watroba misinterprets one of her prime examples.  In 1917 a German reader wrote Kafka about The Metamorphosis , which has now baffled scholars for more than a century.  He said he didn’t know what to make of it, despite his reputation as the wise man of the family, and lamented that “if my reputation with my cousins went to the devil, I couldn’t bear it.”  It’s doubtful that, as Watroba claims, that “his inability to see [the meaning] really pushes him to the brink . . . and threatens his position of authority within the family.”  Many academics have survived this hermeneutic crisis, and this German reader was surely exaggerating his emotional upheaval to get Kafka’s response.

Most of this book describes Watroba tracking down recent imitations of Kafka.  She points the way to the limitations of most works by stating, “the resounding success of Kafka’s Metamorphosis throws into sharp relief the ultimate failure of McEwan’s Cockroach ,” though McEwan is a better author than all the epigones in her book.  Larissa Theule’s Kafka and the Doll recounts the lost letters he wrote to a child in Berlin.  Haruki Murakami’s “Samsa in Love” reverses Kafka’s opening when “an insect wakes up and finds that it now inhabits the body of a man”.

The eponymous ursine in Yoko Tawada’s Japanese novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear “has emigrated from Soviet Russia to West Germany and is currently working hard on improving her fluency in the German language in order to write a bestselling memoir”.  Watroba exclaims that Tawada has won many prizes, as if the winners were now based on merit instead of race and colour. Watroba’s description of the novel, “a factual exposé on socio-political issues facing her demographic”, makes it sound tedious.  Tawada migrated to Germany at the age of 22 and dislikes being labeled a writer from a “minority background”, but her outsider status is precisely what enabled her to get published.

The clever hook in Igoni Barrett’s Blackass is that the Nigerian hero wakes up one morning to find that he’s turned all white—except for his buttocks.  He reveals his deceptive  ploy in the second paragraph by confessing: “Good.  Now that I’ve caught your attention, let’s go back to the beginning and proceed one step at a time.”  One critic’s shrewd observation reveals the weaknesses in all these overrated works: “Kafka’s Metamorphosis doesn’t need extension.  It’s perfect.  It has survived because the core meaning of its story continues to resonate.”

Kafka marked his interest in Asia by quoting a Chinese poem in a letter and writing the fanciful “The Great Wall of China.”  But his superficial dalliance was very different from Ezra Pound’s serious study with the scholar Ernest Fenollosa and his effective use of Chinese characters in the Cantos .

Watroba surprisingly ends her journey in South Korea.  (When I taught there in 1966 it was a horrible and depressing place, overwhelmed by squalor, prostitution and theft, ruled by martial law and ripe for Kafka’s dark vision.)  Kafka’s all the rage in Korea, with academic research, theatre adaptations and influence on imitative contemporary writers.  In one “runaway international success”, the mentally ill heroine of The Vegan refuses to eat and “expresses a desire to turn into a tree”.  Kafka’s “conversation with Mongolian shamans” is meaningless. Watroba’s sinking sentence—“recently translated books by Bae Suah, Cho Nam-joo, Yun Ko-eun, Pyun Hye-young, Kim Young-ha, Lee Ki-ho, Ch’oe In-ho and Jung Young-moon”— is unlikely to arouse the interest of Western readers.  

Watroba notes that The Castle has been translated into Korean 37 times, but does not explain this pointless profusion.  In fact, the government Literary Translation Institute of Korea, endowed with an astonishing equivalent of 7 million pounds, is a gravy train for mercenary writers in search of income.  A Japanese academic reports, “if you want to make a new release a bestseller, you should refer to Kafka in the title or the content, and it might be enough to just use the word ‘Kafka’.”  Kafka, alas, has become a milch-cow for parasitical, derivative and mediocre fiction that doesn’t help readers understand his complex and elusive work.  Watroba does not discuss the most important works inspired by Kafka, which would have strengthened her study: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “A Friend of Kafka” (1970), Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire (1977), Alan Bennett’s play The Insurance Man (1987) and Nicole Krauss’ Forest Dark (2017). 

Watroba’s sophisticated and perceptive comments on Kafka’s work are infinitely more valuable than her cross-cultural examples.  She notes “the contrast between the lucidity of Kafka’s language and the murkiness of his plots”. In his own life, his clear instructions contrasted with his obscure meaning.  He told his close friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts, knowing that Brod, his greatest admirer, would never destroy them.  Watroba writes that Kafka’s “text is also full of careful qualifiers: what we are told is only how things ‘seem’ or ‘appear’ to be”.  She adds, in The Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa expresses “the fear of entrapment in one’s own home, of losing control of one’s body, of an unforeseen and violent disruption of daily life”.  His family, as well as Gregor, “undergoes a transformation”.  His supposedly weak father gets a job and the family celebrates their liberation after Gregor’s death.

In “The Judgment”, where the father condemns his son to death, the son writes to him: “What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments.  It was as though you had no notion of your power”—and his own weakness.  Watroba explains that the son’s letter to his father is not “a possible avenue for communication, but rather a channel for emotional release and power struggle”. She concludes that The Trial could either be a metaphor for all human metaphysical guilt, or an expression of his need to be judged and punished.

The most interesting part of this book is Watroba’s description of studying, with an expert, Kafka’s unpublished “Hebrew Notebooks” in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.  The “Notebooks” begin in 1917 when he started to study Hebrew.  By 1922 he could write to a young friend in Hebrew, with some shaky grammar, awkward diction and a favorite word, “I well understand the chaos one often feels when waiting for a decisive letter that is lost somewhere.  I have felt the same anxiety many times in my life” (my italics).  (By comparison, Edmund Wilson learned Hebrew in his late 50s while preparing to write The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955), and had “Be strong, be strong” from Deuteronomy 31:6 cut in Hebrew letters on his gravestone.)

Kafka’s diary entry, “I wanted a mountain of words to act as a shield against the unknowable,” sounds like T. S. Eliot’s defensive line in The Waste Land , “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.”  In Kafka’s famous parable “Before the Law” a man spends his entire life trying to pass the implacable doorkeeper and gain entrance to the Law.  When he asks why no other person has ever come to the door, the keeper finally tells him, “Nobody else could be granted entry, for this entrance was meant only for you.  I shall go now and close it.”  Watroba evokes this parable when the gates of the Bodleian were locked during Covid.  The parable recurs when Kafka lists the Hebrew word for “doorkeeper” on the first page of his “Notebook.”  Kafka’s famous comment, “What do I have in common with Jews?  I have scarcely anything in common with myself and should stand completely silent in a corner, content that I can breathe,” suggests his sense of alienation from himself, his terrifying fear of existence and the failure of his tubercular lungs.

Like the tubercular Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell, Kafka was a living corpse who led a “posthumous existence” and exclaimed, “With such a body nothing can be achieved.”  Watroba observes, “Kafka writes the body so well: with so much keenly observed detail, so much unexpected comedy, such a verve, a sense of vitality hilariously antithetical to the feebleness he describes.”  Kafka did not achieve most of his deepest desires and some hopes came too late to help him.  He wanted to live apart from his family, leave his job at the insurance company, write full time, finish his three incomplete novels, survive his disease and perhaps even marry his last love, Dora Dimant.  The playwright and Czech President Vaclav Havel expressed the best existential response of all the writers in this book: “In Kafka I have found a portion of my own experience of the world, of myself, and of my way of being in the world.”

Jeffrey Meyers has recently published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath .  His 45 Ways to Look at Hemingway will be out next year, all with LSU Press.

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