“During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work.”
That sentence just fried my synapses.
Photo of Franz Kafka at the National Library of Israel.
Kafka left written instructions to his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, diaries and letters unread. Two months later Brod signed a contract to have Kafka’s novels published. Thank you, Max Brod, for being a shitty friend.
Now there’s some legal wrangling over the remainder of Kafka’s papers, which Brod left to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who left them to her septuagenarian daughters Eva and Ruth, who keep them in a Tel Aviv apartment with a hundred cats.
Should we worry about those papers at all when they were supposed to have been burned?
Read Kafka’s Last Trial by Elif Batuman in the NYT magazine.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
September 25th, 2010 at 02:19
in re author’s papers, manuscripts, check out this article on libraries (and papers) of authors appearing in random bookstores — http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/09/19/lost_libraries/?page=full — should’ve checked the strand’s $1 shelves more closely!
September 25th, 2010 at 14:07
“Letters of Note” featured this letter of him just days ago.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/09/father-you-asked-me-recently-why-i-am.html