The Frankfurt publishing house Stroemfeld recently published the complete works of Franz Kafka. Most of the manuscripts are housed in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. There are notes, first drafts, copies, fragments that don’t go anywhere, variations on narratives. This book presents, somewhat like a sub-titled film, the manuscript page plus a typed version that is legible, but includes the cross-outs and hesitations of Kafka’s hand. In this way we discover Kafka’s struggle with words and his singular way of sculpting language.
This sketchbook is a French translation of a German book by Pavel Schmidt, which was itself inspired by the publication of Kafka’s manuscripts.
And thanks to this edition which is entirely Kafka’s, Pavel Schmidt was able to compare the so-called “official” versions, chosen and authorized by Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, and thus to excerpt hitherto unpublished passages.
Pavel Schmidt created a set of drawings that are diametrically opposed to the conventions of illustration: it isn’t the drawings that illustrate the text, but Kafka’s newly published fragments that were attributed to the drawings. For each drawing, he added the name of a real person from the writer’s life or a fictional character chosen at random from the narrative. For both fans and scholars of Kafka, this encounter will incite new surprises and a reexamination; for the novice, it offers a way into a troubling yet comical universe.