Life After Kafka

by Magdaléna Platzová, Alex Zucker (Translator)

Overview

A novel of Felice Bauer, Franz Kafka’s first fiancée, and the story behind Letters to Felice

Franz Kafka scholars know Felice Bauer, his onetime fiancée, through his Letters to Felice, as little more than a woman with a raucous laugh and a taste for bourgeois comforts. Life After Kafka is her story. The novel begins in 1935 as Felice flees with her children from Hitler’s Berlin, following her family and members of Kafka’s entourage—including Grete Bloch, Max Brod, and Salman Schocken—as they try to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Years later, a man claiming to be Kafka’s son approaches Felice’s son in Manhattan and the drama surrounding Kafka’s letters to Felice begins.

While taking the measure of literary fame’s long shadow, Life After Kafka depicts the magic and poison of memories, and what we cling to when all else is lost. Most of all, it illuminates the bravery required to move forward through the shattered remains of one world to rebuild life in a new one.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954276291
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	08/06/2024
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Magdaléna Platzová is the author of several books, including three novels published in English: Aaron’s Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, The Attempt, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and a Czech Book Award finalist, and Life After Kafka, a Magnesia Litera award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzová grew up in the Czech Republic; studied in Washington, DC, and England; received her MA in Philosophy at Charles Universityin Prague; and has taught at New York University’s Gallatin School. She is now based in Lyon, France.

Editorial Reviews

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.)

Publishers Weekly

EBRD Literature Prize Shortlist

“A tantalizing mystery.” —New York Times Book Review

“A powerful re-imagining of what Kafka’s life and work mean now.” —New York Sun

“A bold exploration of exile, literary history, and the price paid for being part of it.” —WOSU All Sides Weekend: Books & The Longest Chapter

“A remarkable act of fictional recuperation that enables a new generation of Kafka-obsessed readers to feel Felice’s presence yet again.” —Jewish Book Council

“Striking. . . . Incredibly evocative. . . . Life After Kafka, with its mix of research and imagination, arrives at an auspicious moment.” —Words Without Borders

“Brilliantly envision[s] the Kafka-Bauer relationship.” —On the Seawall

“Meticulously researched, vividly envisioned. . . . The writing deftly renders both the texture of life before and after two world wars and the persistent longing of refugees for a home that no longer exists.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“Pos[es] layered questions about what it means to have a role in a famous writer’s legacy, and how that role transforms real people into characters. . . . Fresh and inspiring.” —Necessary Fiction

“Life After Kafka is fascinating for the way that Platzová makes literature itself the main hero. . . . By canceling the enduring distinction between fiction and nonfiction, Platzová options a radical methodology of writing that reveals the unanswerable questions composing our present.” —Asymptote

“Kafka afficionados will thrill to this. . . . Equal parts family memoir and a tantalizing publishing detective story, Life After Kafka raises questions about memory, privacy, and the impact on each by the passage of time.” —Historical Novels Review

“Affecting.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Enchanting. . . . As Felice Bauer receives her spotlight, Platzová deserves one, too.” —Publishers Weekly

“Elegantly translated. . . . An extraordinary read from start to finish.” —Midwest Book Review

“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

From the Publisher

★ 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

Library Journal

2024-06-15
The life of Felice Bauer, one-time fiancee of Franz Kafka, as imagined by a Czech novelist who makes herself part of the story.

Relatively little is known about Felice outside of the trove of letters Kafka wrote her (which she kept hidden for decades; he destroyed all her letters to him). Drawing on theLetters to Felice and years of research, Platzová paints a picture of a refined, well-liked, and resilient woman—the opposite of the brooding, self-doubting Kafka. When his stories became hot items after decades of neglect (he died in 1924), so did the letters. Struggling to get by in Los Angeles after the death of her banker husband, with whom she escaped the Nazi threat in Europe with their children in 1935, she sells the letters to department store magnate turned publisher Salman Schocken for $8,000 with the understanding that they would be donated to the National Library in Jerusalem after publication. To her son’s dismay, they were sold at auction after Schocken’s death for $605,000. Jumping back and forth across the 20th century, from Europe to California to Israel to New York, and with extended appearances by Max Brod, Ernst Weiss, and Grete Bloch, the novel skillfully blends myth, reality, and rumor. An actor comes forth claiming to be Kafka’s son by Bloch (who died at Auschwitz). Platzová somewhat awkwardly enters the novel to explain some of her creative choices and offer a first-person account of her real-life interview with Bauer’s son Henry (renamed Joachim in the book). The novel does what it sets out to do in removing Felice from Kafka’s shadow, but at the cost of telling us little about their relationship. "I find no great story here, just an everyday courageousness that manifests itself mainly in perseverance," writes Platzová. A noble theme, but not one that turns the pages.

An ambitious but less than transcendent work of historical fiction.

Kirkus Reviews