Kafka was an interesting author. He wrote a number of manuscripts and asked his friend, Max Brod to burn them all after his death, he didn’t seem to have any interest in having them published. I can’t begin to speculate on why this is so and I’m hoping some articles will come to shed some light on his reasons. Brod didn’t honour that request, he believed Kafka made those directions specifically because he knew Brod would ignore them. I suppose that’s a reason, ensuring your friend would keep them and publish them but I just don’t buy it.

I’ve read The Trial and I suspect it hasn’t translated to English very well. One article I read talked about the incredibly long sentences Kafka wrote, with some of them going over a whole page with the impact coming just before the full stop, this is made possible due to German sentence structure where the verb is positioned at the end of the sentence. I just found the English translation to be unwieldy and hard to keep track. I would love to read the original but my German is almost non-existent.

Until recently many of Kafka’s manuscripts were stored in bank vaults in Switzerland. You know the vaults, harder to open than a macadamia nut. They’re being opened now and the contents are being read and examined by a team of lawyers, literary experts and Brod’s secretary’s daughter. You can read the article here.