“…the self and the other always meet in the end…” #kafkaesque

There’s been a run of books recently which have arrived at the Ramblings and not even skimmed Mount TBR; and for once, I can remember where I heard about this recent arrival! The book is “Kafkaesque” by Maïa Hruska, translated by Sam Taylor, and it was featured in one of the regular newsletters I get from bookshops; it sounded right up my street so I had to send off for it straight away, and it arrived when I had just finished one book and was ready to start on another. Inevitably, this was the book! The book has a really interesting premise: the subject is, of course, the great author Franz Kafka but instead of looking at his life and work directly, she instead examines him through the lens of the early translators of his work into other languages – and the names of these are perhaps unexpected. As Hruska reveals, luminaries such as Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov all spent time working on translations and annotations of Kafka. There is also Milena…