Kafka-esque?

Franz Kafka's story The Metamorphosis is a fable of a man, Gregor Samsa, who awakes one morning to find himself changed into a giant insect, and of his family's efforts to deal with their former breadwinner's radical transformation.

Elif Batumen recently published a piece in the September 26th New York Times Magazine, "Kafka's Last Trial," on the legal battle over roughly one-third of Kafka's literary estate. This estate, which had been held by Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, was passed upon Brod's death in 1968 to his former secretary Esther Hoffe. When Hoffe died in 2007 at age 101, her will decreed the transference of the legacy to her daughters, who stated their intention to sell it to the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany. The National Library of Israel, however, has claimed rights to the estate under the term's of Brod's will. The case is now being argued in the Israeli courts.

Kafka's work published during his lifetime (which included the Metamorphosis) amounted to less that 450 pages. According to Batumen, however, recent estimates are that a new book on Kafka's work has been published every 10 days for the last 14 years. "Kafka studies now proliferate at a rate inversely proportional to that of Kafka's own production," Elif Batumen writes.

How do we account for the enormous fascination with Kafka? It must have something to do with Kafka having lived on so many levels as an outsider. He was born and raised in Prague of Jewish parents during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he wrote in German.

He was also a literary outsider. According to Werner Hoffmeister's World Book article on Kafka, he has been identified with Expressionism, Surrealism and Existentialism, yet "his writings do not belong to any particular literary school." You just have to read Kafka on his own terms. Some advice on how you do this comes from no less an august literary man than Albert Camus, who wrote (in his essay "Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka") : "Kafka's entire art consists in forcing the reader to re-read."