Letters to Kafka
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A CBC Best Book of 2025
A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.
In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story “The Stoker” from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.
Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Estima's inspired if clunky latest (after the story collection The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society) explores a Czech woman's long-ago romance with novelist Franz Kafka. The story takes the form of an interrogation of Milena Jesenská by SS officer Reinhard Heydrich in a Prague jail in 1939, where she's being held by the Nazis for her role in smuggling Czech Jews into Poland, and for having a Jewish husband. Milena begins by recounting her unhappy marriage to banker Ernst Pollak, who has a mistress on the side. She's enchanted by Kafka when she meets him in a Prague café during a visit to the city, and she writes to him from Vienna, offering to translate his short story "The Stoker." Kafka agrees and the pair arrange to meet in Vienna for a four-day tryst. While some of the writing is stilted ("Milena's heartbeat was spilled ink") and the novel is a touch too long, the interviews with Heydrich culminate with poignant revelations about the fate of Kafka's family during WWII and intriguing suggestions about Milena's connection to his unfinished novel The Castle. Kafka devotees ought to take a look.
