Life After Kafka

June 10, 2024
The enchanting latest from Platzová (The Attempt) brings metafictional elements to a portrait of Felice Bauer, Franz Kafka’s onetime fiancée. The novel opens in 1935, nearly two decades after the end of Bauer’s relationship with Kafka. Now married with children, Bauer flees Europe with her family for America during Hitler’s rise to power. After her husband dies in 1950, she begins running a nail salon out of her home and later opens a sewing shop. As Kafka’s fame grows, letters sent to Bauer by Kafka during their engagement gain the interest of publishers. A few years later, Bauer’s son, Joachim, is approached by a man who claims to be Kafka’s lost son. In chapters set in the 2010s, Platzová recounts her research, such as an interview with the real Joachim, whose name is actually Henry and who gives her his blessing to write about the family, and her decision to preserve Felice’s name despite changing Henry’s, since Kafka had already made her a “literary character.” Though prior knowledge of Kafka’s life and affairs may benefit readers, the novel succeeds thanks to its elastic bounce through time and playful blurring of history and imagination. As Felice Bauer receives her spotlight, Platzová deserves one, too.

Starred review from June 1, 2024

Researchers know about Franz Kafka's unsuccessful engagement to Felice Bauer because she saved 500 of his letters, which were published after her death and analyzed by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, who in Kafka's Other Trial argues that Kafka's The Trial is a restaging of his never resolved engagement to Felice. Beyond that, little is known about Felice. She married a banker, had two children by him, died in the U.S. in 1960, having sold his letters to Salman Schocken, whose heirs permitted publication. This small book by Czech writer Platzova (The Attempt) is an effort to remedy an imbalance, wandering across time, place, people as the writer strives to recreate what happened between this distinctly un-Kafkaesque young woman and a neurasthenic writer. It comes out in dribs and drabs. Felice stands in a bookstore as Kafka, her fianc�, reads aloud "In the Penal Colony," witnessing his humiliation by an alienated audience but also realizing that he has lifted the description of the torture machine from copy she'd written to describe the dictaphones she sold for a living. VERDICT An affecting book and always slightly to the side, as indeed were all of Kafka's writings.--David Keymer

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2024
The life of Felice Bauer, one-time fiancee of Franz Kafka, as imagined by a Czech novelist who makes herself part of the story. Relatively little is known about Felice outside of the trove of letters Kafka wrote her (which she kept hidden for decades; he destroyed all her letters to him). Drawing on theLetters to Felice and years of research, Platzov� paints a picture of a refined, well-liked, and resilient woman--the opposite of the brooding, self-doubting Kafka. When his stories became hot items after decades of neglect (he died in 1924), so did the letters. Struggling to get by in Los Angeles after the death of her banker husband, with whom she escaped the Nazi threat in Europe with their children in 1935, she sells the letters to department store magnate turned publisher Salman Schocken for $8,000 with the understanding that they would be donated to the National Library in Jerusalem after publication. To her son's dismay, they were sold at auction after Schocken's death for $605,000. Jumping back and forth across the 20th century, from Europe to California to Israel to New York, and with extended appearances by Max Brod, Ernst Weiss, and Grete Bloch, the novel skillfully blends myth, reality, and rumor. An actor comes forth claiming to be Kafka's son by Bloch (who died at Auschwitz). Platzov� somewhat awkwardly enters the novel to explain some of her creative choices and offer a first-person account of her real-life interview with Bauer's son Henry (renamed Joachim in the book). The novel does what it sets out to do in removing Felice from Kafka's shadow, but at the cost of telling us little about their relationship. "I find no great story here, just an everyday courageousness that manifests itself mainly in perseverance," writes Platzov�. A noble theme, but not one that turns the pages. An ambitious but less than transcendent work of historical fiction.

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