Chris Rhine's Reviews > Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka

We've come to the point in Kafka's legacy where the journey to find his influence is the point, not the writings that got us there.

In what should be a longish New Yorker or NYRB article celebrating one-hundred years of death, which the marketing team felt compelled to mention in back-to-back sentences introducing this text, Watroba provides a terse first-person memoir on her experiences visiting places that Kafka lived alongside surface-level readings of his writings. Her guiding question is: what made Kafka Kafka? Then she spends five geographical chapters and a coda avoiding an answer. Why? She argues that aesthetic analysis is fine, but it's more interesting to see how readers respond to his works. (No it isn't.)

One of her sub-arguments (as a value judgement not a categorical prefix) is that Kafka's culture and identity (Jewish?, Czech?, German?) should be de-valued while the identity of the reader of his texts should be valued. Is that not an obvious contradiction? But the chapters go on to do the worst of both worlds: lightly describing various Kafka readers in Europe and select parts of Asia as well as the bits of Kafka's bio that one can find on Wikipedia.

One aspect that could have been fleshed out for an engrossing perspective could have been a deeper historical and socio-cultural analysis of Kafka's manuscripts. Even though the Suez Crisis was referenced, Watroba doesn't go into how and why places like Switzerland and the declining British Empire became financial and literary preservation homes in the immediate postwar world, which is quite important and would have fit into the overall worldwide de-contextualizing Kafka as a human and writer thesis.

In short, this 'book' has a confused identity: in searching for Kafka through creating as much ambiguity as possible, Watroba likewise loses any concrete identity to what she's written.