Franz Kafka , the Prague-born writer who died one hundred years ago next month, is more talked about than read – but his work is so powerful that he even gave the world a new word. We describe things we don’t like as “Kafkaesque” so readily that, as Martin Amis put it , the word is used “nowadays to describe a train delay or a long queue in the post office.”
The reputation is both deserved and inadequate: what Kafka’s works really contained were not just unfeeling authorities or desperate loners, but a whole new way of seeing the world, full of black comedy and twisted relationships. Reading his books now, they feel so fresh it’s hard to believe that they were written more than a century ago. Here are the best places to start with Kafka’s work.
Kafka’s most famous novel, published posthumously in 1925, explodes into action from the very first line. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” And this is the book that people mean when they say Kafkaesque : Joseph is trapped in a system he can never understand, tried and sentenced with no idea why. Half-farce, half-nightmare, The Trial shows how Kafka imagined totalitarian regimes before Orwell, and predicted modern anxiety in a way that still feels relevant. (Translated by Idris Parry)
This book, one of the best and most important works of 20th century literature in any language, gathers together all the short stories that Kafka published in his lifetime. His eye for a snappy opening is ever-present (“When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed”), but what sticks is how Kafka blends horrible fantasies with everyday emotions: a torturer lovingly devoted to his infernal device; a man who starves himself for the approval of others. If you only read one book by Kafka, this is the one. (Translated by Michael Hofmann)
This chunky volume, published to coincide with the centenary of Kafka’s death, marks the first time his diaries have been published in full in English. Written mostly between 1911 and 1917, when Kafka was in his late twenties and early thirties, they’re a blend of the mundane (“This evening out of boredom washed my hands three times in succession in the bathroom”) and the first signs of his exceptional talent, as he works up new stories in the pages of his diary, and writes the complete text of his classic story The Judgement in one flurry overnight. (“My legs had grown so stiff from sitting I could hardly pull them out from under the desk.”) In these entries we see both the writer Kafka and the young man Franz, forever looking for what cannot be seen. (Translated by Ross Benjamin)
Like his others, Kafka’s first novel Amerika (also called The Man Who Disappeared ) was published after his death and against his wishes by his closest friend Max Brod, who also gave the novels their titles. Amerika – the story of a boy sent to America by his parents as punishment for getting a girl pregnant – started out as a short story called The Stoker , which was one of the few pieces of his own writing the self-critical Kafka liked: it made him “exuberant”. Critic Michael Hofmann called Amerika “the least ‘Kafka’” of his three novels – his hero is more innocent, the punishments less, well, Kafkaesque – but that variation from what we expect is all the more reason to read it. (Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)
A companion piece to Metamorphosis and Other Stories Poseidon (which reimagines the god of the oceans as a fed-up administrator, not parting the waves with his trident but “up to his ears in figures”) to longer works like Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor , where a lonely office worker finds unwanted company in a pair of blue plastic balls that bounce along, following him everywhere he goes. The stories here remind us that, alongside his reputation for writing about terror and uncaring bureaucracy, Kafka’s work was very funny. (Translated by Michael Hofmann)
Kafka’s obsessive love for Felice Bauer – engaged twice, broken off twice – is recorded in his diaries, but the letters are where it achieves full expression. “There are times when my longing for you overwhelms me so often I can think of you only with teeth clenched.” The letters to Felice over five years record their ups and downs, which was reflected in his work. “You have no idea, Felice, what havoc literature creates inside certain heads.” Felice told him to “live more in the real world,” an order he was powerless to obey – and we are all the beneficiaries of that failure. (And if Felice’s letters aren’t enough, try his later letters to his muse Milena Jesenska, which went viral on TikTok last year.) (Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston, and Philip Boehm)
Like Kafka’s other two novels, The Castle was unfinished – he found it difficult to sustain at length the inspiration that fed his short stories – and it ends literally mid-sentence. The Castle reads like an intensification of the themes in The Trial The Castle has all the classic Kafka elements: guilt, struggle, despair, even sex as K takes advantage of a barmaid in the village. The Castle was the last novel Kafka worked on at the time of his death, and it helps us see why this writer, who published so little in his lifetime, remains read a century later, and will still be read a hundred years from now. (Translated by Idris Parry)
