The circumstances surrounding this week's partial release of the long-sequestered Kafka papers from their Zurich bank vault could be called “Kafkaesque” were it not that the whole saga — full of disobeyed instructions and legal spats — resembles an exceptionally complicated Victorian novel.
Kafka died at 40 in 1924, having commanded his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished papers. This Brod resolutely declined to do, rescuing such masterpieces as The Trial, Metamorphosis and The Castle from the flames, fleeing to Israel in 1939 and eventually bequeathing the rest of the material to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, on his death in 1968.
London Evening Standard
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