A review by easterday
Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka

emotional hopeful lighthearted reflective sad tense medium-paced

i read a review from someone else saying it isn’t fair to rate this book and i couldn’t agree more. it is inhumane to rate someone’s thoughts, when we aren’t meant to intrude anyway. since they aren’t our own, we have no right to judge the way words form for someone else. 

personally, i think this is beautiful. kafka makes it known that he belongs to milena. his words, his name, his dreams; they’re all hers. she holds everything he is and she knows that. 

at the end of the book, milena’s letters to herr doktor are revealed. though this is nothing compared to how much she wrote to kafka, it gives us atleast a little bit of insight to how she felt about him. because milena’s letters to kafka we’re destroyed (in a letter, she later asked herr doktor to get rid of them) we only have one perspective. only through kafka’s direct quoting of her letters do we get to see her. you really have to analyze and use context clues in order to understand what’s going on, as these are letters to eachother, where they know what’s going on, and we are just the outliers looking at them through a magnifying glass.