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
Instapoetry Month
We’re in the thick of National Poetry Month now, and Tweetspeak has a full round-up of ways to participate online. In particular, I think the Virginia Quarterly Review’s “Instapoem” series is especially rad. (Gee, I wonder why.)
●
●
I Slide and Slide
“In the dark comes spiders out of art and first I’m sleuthed away. Measuring up the vying worlds. Meandering into the emphasised words but under neat speeches are oceanous platitudes and so I slide and slide.” An exclusive excerpt from Year in Reading alumna Eimear McBride’s new novel, The Lesser Bohemians, in The Times Literary Supplement.
Press Play
The New York Times unveiled a new music blog entitled Press Play. Each week, the blog will “present tracks from an upcoming new album.”
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Day Jobs
This week in book-related infographics, round 2: Lapham's Quarterly takes a look at the day jobs of famous authors, among them T.S. Eliot, who was responsible for processing reports on German debt, and Charlotte Bronte, who had laundry fees deducted from her pay. Pair with our own Emily St. John Mandel's essay on "Working the Double Shift" and "all the strangely varied occupations that a person accumulates when the primary objective is not to establish a career, per se, but just to pay the rent while they’re working on a novel."
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Buckley; May; Vallgren; Miller
Out this week: The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley; Paradise City by Elizabeth May; The Merman by Carl-Johan Vallgren; and The Penguin Collected Plays of Arthur Miller. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
●
●
Talking Fails
Mark O’Connell discusses Epic Fail with Lauren Eggert-Crowe at The Rumpus. Contrary to what its title may lead you to believe, Mark’s book has been described as “expertly researched” and “wonderfully witty.”
●
●
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