Franz Kafka has long been emblematic of the 20th century. Appropriated and enlisted by existentialists, theologians and psychoanalysts alike, he is somewhere between witness and patron saint. Without hesitation we claim our world is ‘Kafkaesque’, its bureaucratic absurdities mirroring our own moral and interpersonal perplexities. Even ideological battles fought on either side of the Iron Curtain were waged in his name.

I have written previously in these pages (‘Bookends’, August 2024) about the slippery nature of the K-word that gives Maïa Hruska’s book its English title (it first appeared in French, in 2024, to mark the centenary of Kafka’s death). Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century, briskly translated by Sam Taylor, restores some specificity to the term by returning us to the writers who carried Kafka across linguistic borders. No translator, Hruska observes, worked on Kafka by chance or simple commission; each felt claimed by him.

Hruska has read widely and deeply, taking in the diaries and correspondence, as well as the lesser-known fragmentary stories, such as Kafka’s retelling of the Tower of Babel. Babel is the foundational myth of linguistic division, but Kafka’s version is characteristically perverse: the scale of the tower-building project generates such