After a long and complicated drama that played out for five years in Israeli courts, a collection of Franz Kafka and Max Brod manuscripts will be transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem. The unique circumstances at play in this case have been previously written about by Elif Batuman.
Kafka Papers Overcome Kafkaesque Legal Issues
A Classic of the Future
“The thriller, set in a dystopian future where women and girls can kill men with a single touch, was the favourite on a shortlist that included former winner Linda Grant and Man Booker-shortlisted Madeleine Thien.” Naomi Alderman’s The Power has become the first speculative work to nab the Baileys prize for women’s fiction, reports The Guardian, noting that the judges said Alderman’s book would be “a classic of the future.” See also: a few years back we highlighted a collaboration between Alderman and Year in Reading alum Margaret Atwood, a comic zombie novel that you can still read in its entirety here.
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1Q84 Uncovered
The cover for Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited 1Q84 has been unveiled. The book is due out in October.
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Addressing the Critics
Last week, I directed you to Catie Disabato’s Thick Skin interview at 0s&1s. This week, Year in Reading alum Laura van den Berg joins them for the latest installment of the series, in which authors address their critics. We also recently interviewed van den Berg following the release of her first novel, Find Me.
What About Your Head?
“None of us made love, we had only reproaches for one another. I hated that dependency and yet I couldn’t live without it.” This short piece by Mercè Rodoreda from the new issue of Harper’s Magazine is brutal and surprising. The piece is an excerpt from Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, out later this month.
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Joke’s On You
“How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg writes some great jokes to use at your next cocktail party.
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While the long-awaited conclusion of the trial in Tel Aviv Family Court over the Brod Collection is good news, I am afraid that with the promised ensuing appeals, which could take years to settle, it is only the illusion of a solution for researchers like myself, an “apparent aquittal,” as Kafka has the painter Titorelli explain to Joseph K in “The Trial”:
“The documents remain as they were, except that the affidavit is added to them and a record of the acquittal and the grounds for granting it. The whole dossier continues to circulate, as the regular official routine demands, passing on to the higher Courts, being referred to the lower ones again, and thus swinging backwards and forwards with greater or smaller oscillations, longer or shorter delays. Their peregrinations are incalculable.”
[The Trial, Vintage, p 198.]
Of course, I will be delighted if I am mistaken in this regard, and if the Brod Collection actually is made available to the public soon. My interest in the Brod Collection centers on 70 letters that Dora Diamant wrote to Max Brod over a 25 year period, for which I have a catalogued list. Those letters have extraordinary significance to the SDSU Kafka Project’s ongoing search for Kafka’s 35 letters and 20 notebooks confiscated from Dora Diamant by the Gestapo in 1933.
I would like to also add that I feel sorry for Eva Hoffe for the loss of her sister, and for the enormous cost of the legal battle to her own life. I also regret that for the researchers and experts who will be charged with sorting it all out someday, it may be too late to have Hoffe’s personal knowledge of the archive to help frame it.
This litigenous legacy is the last thing Franz Kafka would have wanted.
But clearly he envisioned an aspect of it in his literature.
— Kathi Diamant
Director, Kafka Project
Adjunct Professor, San Diego State University
Author, Kafka’s Last Love