Franz Kafka began writing the novel The Castle in 1922 and died two years later, before he could finish it. Famously, it ends mid-sentence, becoming part of a body of unpublished work that he instructed his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy. Brod, to his everlasting credit, did not. This book has continued to amaze and inspire readers for nearly a century, since its 1926 debut.
The latest take on the novel comes from Seth Rogoff, a novelist and scholar of media studies and literature. The American-born author has lived and worked for much of his professional life in Prague and Berlin. Those are excellent credentials for a writer trying to channel the spirit of an Austrian-Czech Jew who wrote in German and created a fictional universe that spawned its own adjective — “Kafkaesque” — to describe the surreal impediments of the modern bureaucratic state.
In Rogoff’s version of The Castle, a renowned translator named Sy Kirschbaum, who has appeared in two of Rogoff’s previous novels, arrives in a village similar to the one at the center of Kafka’s work, except that all its inhabitants have disappeared, leaving only traces of their lives behind.
Unlike Kafka, who narrates his story in the third person, Rogoff tells this version in the first person. “I arrived at the village at dusk,” Kirschbaum says. “I crossed the bridge and entered the abandoned, desolate space. From what I can tell, there isn’t a single person here, no sign of human life.”
Thus begins a metafictional investigation of what happened after Kafka’s beleaguered land surveyor, known only by the initial “K.,” showed up in a snowbound village ruled by a mysterious bureaucracy headquartered in a castle atop a nearby hill.
While Kafka’s story unfolds in a reasonably true-to-life, albeit eerie, setting, Rogoff’s springs from the feverish imagination of Kirschbaum, who admits at the outset that he has spent seventeen years of his life translating a “1,456-page samizdat masterpiece,” a monumental labor that precipitated a nervous breakdown.
As Kirschbaum tries to piece together what became of Kafka’s world, he turns to missing documents, alternative histories, and narratives within narratives. Eventually, he penetrates the inner sanctum of the castle, where he has an apocalyptic vision that seems to justify his quest. Rogoff has written a complicated, confounding homage to a literary hero.
Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at The Associated Press. Her memoir and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and she has read her stories on stage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read.
