Franz Kafka

Review

Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review – the master who never wasted a word

A Franz Kafka scholar’s perceptive annotation and translation highlights every subtle shade of humour and brilliant aphorism in these singular tales

John Banville

9 July 2024

In the case, the singular case, of Franz Kafka, the law of diminishing returns might be applied in an adapted form: the more diminished the text, the richer the return. He was a master of the fragment, and an aphorist every bit as great as Nietzsche or Rochefoucauld. Consider these few examples. “A cage went in search of a bird.” “I feel like a Chinaman going home; but then, I am a Chinaman going home.” “There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.” “In your struggle with the world, hold the world’s coat.” And then there is that famous, and famously sly, response he gave to his friend Max Brod who had asked if there was any hope to be had in the world: “Plenty of hope – for God – no end of hope – only not for us.”

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being author dies aged 94

The Czech novelist found himself silenced by the communist regime at home, but achieved international fame with playfully philosophical fiction

Richard Lea and Sian Cain

Wednesday 12 July 2023

Czech writer Milan Kundera, who explored being and betrayal over half a century in poems, plays, essays and novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94 after a prolonged illness, Anna Mrazova, spokesperson for the Milan Kundera Library, has confirmed.

The Joke by Milan Kundera / Review

The Joke by Milan Kundera 

(1967)

‘A melancholy duet about the schism between body and soul’ (Milan Kundera in the Introduction)

Czech history – a postwar snapshot

Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. When he was ten the Nazis annexed his country and imposed Nazi rule, when he was 16 the Russians liberated his homeland, and when he was 19 the Russians supported the February 1948 coup which brought a communist government to power. Initially, many of the brightest and best in the country celebrated a new era which promised to deliver a new world of freedom and justice and equality for all. Soon enough the government showed its Stalinist colours, rounding up not only conservatives and capitalists, big landowners, bankers and so on, but also socialist and liberal writers and critics. Hundreds of thousands were sacked from their jobs, around a hundred thousand were imprisoned and tens of thousands executed as spies and traitors and saboteurs, including friends and colleagues of Kundera’s.

Milan Kundera on Franz Kafka (1979)

Franz Kafka

Milan Kundera on Franz Kafka (1979)

In 1979 the Czech novelist Milan Kundera published a short essay about the works of fellow Czech and Prague inhabitant, Franz Kafka. The essay was titled Somewhere behind.

Throughout it Kundera uses the adjective ‘Kafkan’, which seems perverse of either him or the translator, because everyone else in the English-speaking world talks about the ‘Kafkaesque’.