One evening in September 1912, at a friend’s home in Berlin, Franz Kafka happened to meet Felice Bauer. Although the note he made of this incident in his diary was none too complimentary of Felice, he nonetheless initiated a fervid correspondence with her. Over the five-year period from 1912-1917 — during which the two would twice become engaged and twice break it off — Kafka would write her, from Prague, more than 500 letters.

Her letters to him have been lost, but she saved his to her in all their awkward, impassioned, self-absorbed urgency. Shortly before her death in 1960, she sold them. Their subsequent publication unleashed a cascade of academic commentary in which Felice’s relationship with (and influence on) the acclaimed writer was scrutinized, but the lady herself was more or less ignored.

Life After Kafka seeks to remedy this oversight by both documenting — where possible — and imagining the rest of Felice’s life. It is a meticulously researched, vividly envisioned work, written in language both restrained and piercing. With a delicate hand, Czech author Magdaléna Platzová goes about mapping a web of relationships involving the people whose lives touched or were touched by Felice and Kafka long before he grew famous.

In brief, Felice led a quiet life out of the public eye. She married a man of substance some 10 years her senior and had two children. There’s little doubt her life in Germany would’ve been prosperous and uneventful had Hitler not come to power. The family fled to Geneva, then moved to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. Felice, who’d been brought up in somewhat straitened circumstances, adjusted to their diminished means (and eventually to her husband’s ill health), pursuing practical ways to earn a living. Fiercely independent but lacking the resources to finance her own drawn-out, end-of-life decline, Felice was at long last forced to sell Kafka’s letters to publisher Salman Schocken, a charming and empathetic figure in his own right.

For the first hundred pages of the novel, connections and relationships are difficult to follow, as the chapters dive back and forth in time and place, introducing characters with abandon. Yet 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, creating a trust in the narration that keeps you turning the pages. Indeed, its depth and breadth of feeling make this book one that invites rereading.

Life After Kafka dwells in the shadowy realm between fiction and nonfiction. It traffics for its main characters in the lives of real people, some of whose names have been changed. It combines actual events with invented ones and introduces fictional characters, as well. These are common enough traits in the modern novel, but Platzová does the unexpected when she enters the narrative herself as a kind of chief detective who lets the reader in on both the discovery of fact and the creation of fiction. The author’s musings over the decade she spent researching and writing the book become part of the story. Here, she reflects on the unlikeliness of Felice and Kafka as a couple:

“She brushes her teeth, rinses out the sink, and puts her toothpaste and toothbrush back in their place. He, on the other hand, is constantly at risk of having the tube of toothpaste suddenly leap into his face and reveal one of the secrets of the universe.

“Could the two of them ever live together?”

Three generations fill the story, living their lives — marrying, having children, working, divorcing, and alternately experiencing joy, regret, hope, satisfaction, and doubt — successfully or otherwise. Virtually all the action takes place after Kafka’s death, and nowhere does he himself appear as a character in the narrative. But memory drives the tale, and his long shadow looms over it. In that sense, despite its title, the novel isn’t “after Kafka” at all.

A familiarity with Kafka’s oeuvre would add dimension to the reading experience, as would some prior knowledge of his letters to Felice. But lacking these, there is still much to enjoy in this thoughtful portrait of a woman and her world.

Marilyn Oser is the author of the novels This Storied Land, November to July, Even You, and Rivka’s War; the blog “Streets of Israel”; and other short fiction and nonfiction. A recipient of the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Prize, she has been called “a particularly gifted novelist” by the Midwest Review.

comments powered by Disqus