Book Review
“Lovers of Franz K” By Burhan Sonmez
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman
Although he published more than 80 books, Max Brod is unknown to most American readers, except, perhaps, as the best friend of Franz Kafka, one of the most widely revered authors of the twentieth century. At the time of his death – of tuberculosis, at 40, in 1924 – Kafka had published very little and was virtually unknown. His three inimitable novels – The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika – lay unfinished, and most of his singular stories existed only in manuscript. As his life drew to an abrupt close, Kafka instructed Brod to burn all his writings. Brod defied that request, and it is Brod we can credit for the fact that everything Kafka wrote – even his diaries and letters – was preserved and published. Kafka entered the pantheon of modern literature – beside James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf – because Brod betrayed his best friend’s wishes.
Brod is an off-stage character in Lovers of Franz K., Burhan Sönmez’s sixth novel, his first in Kurdish; the other books were written in Turkish. In West Berlin in 1968, Commissioner Müller tries to take charge of a case that he calls “unlike any other murder inquiry.” A 20-year-old student has been shot dead, and Ferdy Kaplan is in custody. The son of a Turkish father and a German mother, Kaplan admits and regrets his responsibility. However, he taunts Müller for his failure to grasp what the crime was all about. He notes that the student was an unintended target and that someone else was wounded in the incident. That other victim was an old man named Max Brod.
Most of Lovers of Franz K. is a philosophical dialogue about the responsibilities of readers to books and authors they love. It largely takes the form of a transcript of exchanges between Kaplan and his interrogators. Political turmoil in Berlin, Paris, and Istanbul leads the commissioner to suspect some geopolitical connection to the attack. A resistance magazine in France has published an article denouncing Brod, and Kaplan may or may not be connected to a violent underground ring intent on wreaking revenge against Brod for his treachery toward Kafka. Kaplan points out how that treachery goes beyond merely publishing the man’s private manuscripts. Brod broke up Kafka’s long paragraphs into short ones, changed the title of The Man Who Disappeared to Amerika, and, despite Kafka’s explicit opposition to such illustration, used the image of an insect to accompany The Metamorphosis.
Declining to attend Kaplan’s trial, Brod himself sends a short letter that expresses deep remorse for defying his best friend’s request. “Kafka was my God,” he writes, “and I had disregarded his will. If Dante were alive today, he would have found me deserving of the Inferno in his Comedy.” Brod’s reversal is so dramatic that it raises suspicion that he in fact wrote the article denouncing himself and, consumed by self-loathing, tried to engineer his own assassination.
As their conversations continue, Kaplan and Müller become less antagonistic toward each other. The commissioner begins to understand how someone could become homicidally resentful of literary treason, and Kaplan, Kafka’s self-appointed avenger who declared: “I’m just a volunteer trying to fulfill the wishes of a dead person,” now expresses sympathy for Brod’s actions.
Lacking facility in Kurdish, I cannot judge to what extent Sami Hêzil betrayed Sönmez – the president of PEN International who lives in England in exile from his native Turkey – by translating his Kurdish prose into lucid English. However, the Italian adage traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor) – like the Turkish Tercüme ihanet eder (translation betrays) – is a reminder that every transposition is a distortion. Moreover, when we read, we also reimagine, so aren’t literary texts always in the process of being reappropriated from their authors? “The words of a dead man” wrote W.H. Auden about the poems of W.B. Yeats, “Are modified in the guts of the living.”
A short book with flat characters and wooden dialogue, Lovers of Franz K. is a novel of ideas. Two tantalizing thoughts linger after its unexpected conclusion: We sometimes honor our friends best by resisting their wishes. And, especially with a novel as crafty as this one, reading is always misreading.
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Lovers of Franz K. by Burhan Sönmez; translated from Kurdish by Sami Hêzil; Other Press; 2025; $22.00.