Publishers Weekly
06/10/2024
The enchanting latest from Platzová (The Attempt) brings metafictional elements to a portrait of Felice Bauer, Franz Kafka’s onetime fiancée. The novel opens in 1935, nearly two decades after the end of Bauer’s relationship with Kafka. Now married with children, Bauer flees Europe with her family for America during Hitler’s rise to power. After her husband dies in 1950, she begins running a nail salon out of her home and later opens a sewing shop. As Kafka’s fame grows, letters sent to Bauer by Kafka during their engagement gain the interest of publishers. A few years later, Bauer’s son, Joachim, is approached by a man who claims to be Kafka’s lost son. In chapters set in the 2010s, Platzová recounts her research, such as an interview with the real Joachim, whose name is actually Henry and who gives her his blessing to write about the family, and her decision to preserve Felice’s name despite changing Henry’s, since Kafka had already made her a “literary character.” Though prior knowledge of Kafka’s life and affairs may benefit readers, the novel succeeds thanks to its elastic bounce through time and playful blurring of history and imagination. As Felice Bauer receives her spotlight, Platzová deserves one, too. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Affecting.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Skillfully blends myth, reality, and rumor.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Enchanting. . . . As Felice Bauer receives her spotlight, Platzová deserves one, too.” —Publishers Weekly
“A deeply empathetic story of survival, exile, and belonging. Magdaléna Platzová allows Felice Bauer to step out of Kafka’s shadow and, in the process, she recognizes that there is always so much more than one truth. This is a powerful, kaleidoscopic literary novel.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon
“This elegantly narrated novel, full of fascinations, paints an impassioned and poignant portrait of Felice Bauer and other exiles connected to Franz Kafka and charts a compelling cartography of their now vanished world.” —Benjamin Balint, author of Kafka’s Last Trial and Bruno Schulz
“In Life After Kafka, Magdaléna Platzová movingly portrays Felice Bauer’s valiant efforts to forge a new life for herself and her family in the wake of historical catastrophe, even as she grapples with whether to reveal an intimate and painful chapter of her past in service to Kafka’s literary legacy. This meticulously researched and vividly imagined tale peels back the layers of cultural myth, offering a testament to a different kind of heroism.” —Ross Benjamin, translator of The Diaries of Franz Kafka
“With Life After Kafka, Magdaléna Platzová has evoked a cosmopolitan storm of post–World War II emotion, an obsessive level of research, and a unique documentary-style attention that adds not only to the mystery of Franz Kafka, but to the scholarship of Kafka as well. This original, sophisticated novel bewitches and inspires.” —Joanna Hershon, author of The Outside of August and St. Ivo
“Franz Kafka is a universe that resists any attempt at interpretation. Magdaléna Platzová’s novel offers a new key to Kafka’s world: we look at it through the tender and sorrowful gaze of the people whose fate had been marked by him personally. An utterly touching book!” —Agnieszka Holland, award-winning filmmaker and president of the European Film Academy
“Life After Kafka is a thrilling detective story about one of literature’s most celebrated names, a haunting family saga about preserving our legacy during the darkest turns of history, and a thought-provoking exploration of the rippling impact of famous artists on the people in their lives. Platzová’s masterful merging of fact and fiction, in Alex Zucker’s artful and inspired translation, carries us across decades and continents to prove that our connections can be abandoned and yet unbroken, and that even the briefest encounters—in love and in art—can shape us forever.” —Jaroslav Kalfař, author of Spaceman of Bohemia and A Brief History of Living Forever
“Life After Kafka is not just a fictional quest to find out who Kafka’s fiancée, Felice Bauer, was and what kind of life she led after their five-year correspondence ended. In it, ‘life after Kafka’ is the existential situation into which a community of Prague-based, Jewish intellectuals were thrown . . . capturing the living conditions and possibilities of the refugees after the loss of their homes and relationships, after the shattering of the world whose ruins each of them took with them in a few suitcases.” —Magnesia Litera jury citation
Library Journal
★ 06/01/2024
Researchers know about Franz Kafka's unsuccessful engagement to Felice Bauer because she saved 500 of his letters, which were published after her death and analyzed by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, who in Kafka's Other Trial argues that Kafka's The Trial is a restaging of his never resolved engagement to Felice. Beyond that, little is known about Felice. She married a banker, had two children by him, died in the U.S. in 1960, having sold his letters to Salman Schocken, whose heirs permitted publication. This small book by Czech writer Platzova (The Attempt) is an effort to remedy an imbalance, wandering across time, place, people as the writer strives to recreate what happened between this distinctly un-Kafkaesque young woman and a neurasthenic writer. It comes out in dribs and drabs. Felice stands in a bookstore as Kafka, her fiancé, reads aloud "In the Penal Colony," witnessing his humiliation by an alienated audience but also realizing that he has lifted the description of the torture machine from copy she'd written to describe the dictaphones she sold for a living. VERDICT An affecting book and always slightly to the side, as indeed were all of Kafka's writings.—David Keymer
