Max Brod has a lot to answer for. As the closest thing Franz Kafka had to a best friend, and more pertinently also his literary executor, Brod was given clear instructions that he was to destroy all Kafka’s unpublished work following his death, which came on June 3, 1924. Brod ignored this, and we can thank him for bringing all three of Kafka’s full-length novels, The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika, into print as a result. English translations by the husband and wife team of Edwin and Willa Muir started to appear in 1930 with The Castle, the book Kafka had labored over and then abandoned not long before his death at the age of forty, a victim of tuberculosis that in time made the act of swallowing so painful that it now appears he succumbed to starvation.
Read Full Article »
