Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, Bellevue Literary Press, 2024
Collage is perhaps the best term to describe Czech author Magdaléna Platzová’s Life after Kafka (Život po Kafkovi), recently translated into English by Alex Zucker. The cover of the book distinguishes the text as a novel, yet its two hundred and fifty pages are in effect an intricate labyrinth of letters, diaries, interviews, fictions, and the author’s own descriptions of working on the book, all blurring the boundary between fact and imagination. Bringing these myriad fragments together is a common thread: the life of Felice Bauer, one of Kafka’s many women. To Platzová, she remains a mystery: “Who really was Felice Bauer? Who was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture, and precisely set watches? . . . Little is known of her life after Kafka. She got married, had two children, and immigrated to America. Did she leave any traces behind?”
This erasure in the numerous works of Kafkology inspired Platzová to spend ten years writing about Bauer, and the resulting text finally appeared in Czech in 2022 (with the English edition coincidentally being published this year, the one hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death). Kafka’s life—a short one of forty years—was shared by at least six very different women, mostly Jewish, verging from Austrian, Czech, German, to Polish: Hedwig Weiler, Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch, Julie Wohryzek, Milena Jesenská (the only non-Jewish exception), and Dora Diamant. Academia and popular culture have mostly retained Jesenská—herself a prolific journalist and writer—and Diamant as the main feminine figures in Kafka’s life, but Bauer, who hailed from Berlin, was Kafka’s first fiancée. They first met in Prague in 1912, and maintained a relationship until 1917, when Kafka broke their engagement for the second time. Grete Bloch, who was a friend of Bauer’s, met Kafka in 1913 and ended up playing a major role between the two. Kafka also wrote letters to Bloch, and she later intervened in the relationship between him and Bauer, at a time when the couple was drifting apart. Platzová centers her narrative around these two female figures, telling the story of how their lives intersected in the shared link to Kafka, and how his letters became a focal point of their complicated existences in exile, haunting them to their last days.
In After Kafka, Bauer and Bloch, as well as their two sons, all live under the shadow of Kafka, who remains a distant and foggy figure. However, their personalities and lives do not follow the typical trajectory of novelistic character development. Instead, they are approached from different points in space and time, given alternative identities, and described in language that sometimes resembles fiction and other times academic non-fiction. This literary strategy of mixing genres is being adopted by a number of contemporary Czech authors—such as Alena Machoninová, who takes experimental approaches to reanimate historical figures, ensuring that they are enlivened through storytelling instead of condemned into a fixed past. Through her collection of literary mirrors, Platzová avoids painting a final and definitive portrait of Bauer; instead, she iterates her own fascination for a woman who defies easy reading: “I find no great story here, just an everyday courageousness that manifests itself mainly in perseverance. Withdrawn, hardworking, unliterary.” As such, the question that ranges across After Kafka is ever ongoing: how could such a woman be charmed by Kafka’s tortured soul, cruel indecisiveness, pathological impracticality, and total dedication to writing—which he clearly prioritized above all other things, including love? And how could Bauer maintain such a strong attachment with him for over five years? Far from putting those questions to rest, the book invites a variety of voices, testimonies, and descriptions, continuing to open passages into a persistent literary afterlife. The reader is invited along this journey, as both a companion and a fellow investigator.
As a result, there is no clear plotline that guides After Kafka; chapters start with various dates and locations, and each of the narrators provide a distinct access point to the central idea. Kafka’s letters to Bauer link all the chapters in an enquiry for what initially seems to be a quest for truth, but soon the reader is made to understand the story as something merging Kafka and Kurosawa’s Rashomon, wherein each character governs their own version of the same story. Alex Zucker’s translation finely guides these various threads, fitting the various pieces into the narrative puzzle while keeping the genres distinctive in style and the voices balanced in tone.
Throughout, Platzová uses her characters to question how the enduring presence of a cultural titan can dramatize and fictionalize every individual who becomes wrapped up in that legacy; in doing so, she does not consign herself to the role of biographer, but licenses the full use of her imagination to tell the warped and shifting story of changing times and perspectives. Bauer’s son, for example, is someone who Platzová meets in real life for a short one-hour conversation, as a ninety-year-old New Yorker. But he also appears in the book as Joachim, a fictional doppelgänger who allows Platzová to extend their brief and partial (albeit intense) exchange. This narrative choice gives the reader an interesting experience of crossing the artificial border between non-fiction and fiction by simply switching to a different name, a lateral movement that allows the reader to discover the different aspects of a single personality.
Bloch is given the same literary treatment as Bauer: both keep their real names throughout the book, because, as Platzová points out: “How important are names? Why in one book was I able to rename Emma Goldman ‘Louise G.’ and Alexander Berkman ‘Andrei B.’, while Felice remains ‘Felice’ and Grete ‘Grete’? . . . It may be because Kafka introduced them to literature long before I did, via his letters. Felice and Grete have become literary characters, and characters can’t be renamed; their names are what define them.” Here, Platzová offers precious insights into her own writing and research strategy, illustrating the many choices available to an author who is willing to experiment with a mixing of literary genres, while being utterly transparent about her choices.
The most dramatic hybrid figure of fiction and non-fiction, however, is Appelbaum, also known as Casimiro Bloch, who claims to be the son of Bloch and Kafka. While there is mention in a real-life letter by Grete Bloch of a son who died at the age of seven, Kafka scholars generally dispute the possibility of his biological father being Kafka. But the very notion of Kafka having had a son is entertaining enough for a fictional project, given the writer’s own conflicted relations with his father. Platzová also presents a subtle dopplegänger relationship between Henry/Joachim and Bloch/Appelbaum towards the end of her book, having them appear as elderly grandfathers in opposite—yet related—mirrors of one another.
Overall, After Kafka is fascinating for the way that Platzová makes literature itself the main hero. The book starts with two letters from Joachim to the author Elias Canetti, who wrote a book called Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, based on the actual letters from Kafka to Bauer. This framing of After Kafka introduces an element of the detective genre, which is present in other Kafka-related texts, such as Benjamin Balint’s Kafka’s Last Trial. Balint’s book, published in 2018, explores a legal battle between Germany and Israel over Kafka’s unpublished works, which number thousands of pages. Platzová’s novel can thus be seen in the vein of such texts, which ask the uneasy questions of legal but also moral ownership—of who gets to decide what should remain private and what should be shared publicly because of its literary or cultural value, of who benefits from the financial transactions linked to the purchase and selling of private letters, of what institutions are best placed to host and preserve literary archives.
For a long time, Bauer’s position on the letters she kept (from Kafka to herself and to Bloch) was to keep them and not to show them to anyone. She did eventually sell them towards the end of her life, using them to pay for medical bills, but very unwillingly. After Kafka mentions how unfair that deal was, but most importantly, Platzová details her unwillingness to part with the letters. Quoting Henry, she writes: “I finally forced her to sell them. She was sick and needed every dollar. If I hadn’t, she would have burned them. Schocken paid her eight thousand dollars and promised that he would donate the originals to a library in Jerusalem. But after he died, his heirs auctioned off my mother’s letters at Sotheby’s for over half a million dollars. My mother got eight thousand.”
Going through the pages of Life After Kafka is an unusual and inspiring experience. The writer introduces more and more complex questions: what do letters reveal of the life and creativity of an author? How are they part of a writer’s literary legacy? Instead of answers, she invites the reader to navigate a complex game in order to make their own judgments, draw their own conclusions, or, most likely, remain as perplexed as the author, and thus free to continue the exploration in their own imagination. By canceling the enduring distinction between fiction and non-fiction, Platzová options a radical methodology of writing that reveals the unanswerable questions composing our present, suggesting that our role as writers and readers is not to put them to rest, but to make sure that they are continually asked.
Filip Noubel was raised in a Czech-French family in Tashkent, Odesa, and Athens. He later studied Slavonic and East Asian languages in Tokyo, Paris, Prague, and Beijing. He has worked as a journalist and media trainer in Central Asia, Nepal, China, and Taiwan, and is now based in Taipei as Managing Editor for Global Voices Online. He is also a literary translator, interviewer, editor-at-large for Central Asia for Asymptote, and guest editor for Beijing’s DanDu magazine. His translations from Chinese, Czech, Russian, and Uzbek have appeared in various magazines, and include the works of Yevgeny Abdullayev, Bakh Akhmedov, Radka Denemarková, Jiří Hájíček, Soňa Pokorná, Huang Chong-kai, Hamid Ismailov, Martin Ryšavý, Tsering Woeser, Guzel Yakhina, David Zábranský, and Zhang Qianfan amongst others.
*****
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