Reviews

Forgiving the Angel: Four Stories for Franz Kafka by Jay Cantor

jasonfurman's review

4.0

The four interrelated stories in "Forgiving the Angel" all center around people who Franz Kafka loved and their fate and the fates of the people around them in Stalin's Gulag and Hitler's concentration camps. The first story is about Kafka's dying and Max Brod's famous dilemma about how to handle Kafka's dying wish that all of his unpublished work be destroyed. The second is a fragment of a story Kafka is supposed to have written. The third is the longest in the book, more of a novella of its own, about Kafka's widow's remarrying a German communist, the daughter they have, and his inability to compete with the presence of the ghost/god of Kafka in both women's lives even as he is sent to the Gulag and eventually returns. The final story takes place in the concentration camp where Kafka's translator/chaste lover Milena has been sent and describes a love affair she has amidst the horror, with once again Kafka looming right over the surface.

The stories themselves draw some of their style and mannerism from Kafka, like the accretion of small details, but unlike Kafka they are much more rooted in a very real and painful world--and also have more love and sentiment. Overall the effect is one of a circle of friends that surround Kafka for decades after his death and keep him alive in their worlds and their memories.

At times I found the book absorbing, but it was not uniformly so and parts of it felt unnecessarily obscure, at least to me. But overall would recommend it.