Rainer Maria Rilke’s claim that fame is the ‘sum of all misunderstandings’ is certainly true of Franz Kafka, whose life, work and reception have long been plagued by myriad misunderstandings. Despite publishing comparatively little in his all-too-short lifetime (1883-1924), Kafka gained a reputation as a writer’s writer, whose work was met with keen appreciation by, among others, Rilke, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann.

In Kafkaesque, which first appeared in French under the title Dix versions de Kafka, Maïa Hruska charts Kafka’s afterlife through the perspective of ten ‘first’ writer-translators. These range from luminaries such as Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz and Primo Levi to lesser known but intriguing figures such as Kafka’s friend and briefly lover Milena Jesenská, who translated some of his stories into Czech, and Melech Ravitch, who translated him into Yiddish, a language of which Kafka was an early and passionate advocate.

In this remarkably polished first book, Hruska, a versatile Franco-Czech journalist who works for a literary agency in London, brings a welcome freshness of vision and a dashing style to shelves groaning with soberly written Kafka studies. Her family history, which traces back to German- and Czech-speaking Jews in Prague, energises her literary explorations. Her grandmother, Ludmilla Kafka (so far no proven relation), survived the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi-occupied Bohemia.

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Not least among Hruska’s rediscoveries is the self-described ‘notoriously unknown’ French novelist Alexandre Viallate. He, while........

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