Arnold Beer

The only English translation of the novel by Max Brod, a German-speaking Jewish writer living in Prague in the early decades of the twentieth century. The novel's eponymous hero shares some character traits with the author, reflecting in particular his relationship with his friend Franz Kafka. Arnold is described as something of a dilettante who 'attempted to instil his own drive and energy into the minds of others'. Similarly Brod, in his own word, 'wrested from Kafka nearly everything he published either by persuasion or by guile'. In another reflection of Brod's own experience Arnold becomes involve in the promotion of an air-show similar to that which Brod and Kafka attended in Brescia, Italy in 1909.