Amerika: The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text by Franz Kafka

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A review by David L. Ulin

It's always tricky when an author's name becomes an adjective. Orwellian, Machiavellian, Faulknerian -- these designations make it hard to see a writer on his or her own terms. This is perhaps most true of Franz Kafka, whose sobriquet, Kafkaesque, has become a catchall for the weird and inexplicable.

Yet 84 years after his death of tuberculosis at age 40, Kafka continues to defy such simplifications, to force us to consider him anew. That's the effect of Mark Harman's new translation of his first novel, Amerika, restored to its original title, The Missing Person.

Amerika has long held an anomalous place among Kafka's writings; it's a comic anti-picaresque in which a young European named Karl Rossmann immigrates to the United States and undergoes a series of adventures, not so much finding as losing his way in the world. In this new version, Harman offers an unfiltered take on the novel, which was left unfinished when Kafka abandoned work on it in 1914.

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