If you're estranged from a parent, you'll want to read Kafka's Letter to the Father. In the span of forty-five typewritten pages, totaling 121 pages in Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins's bilingual edition, Kafka manages to replicate and capture the anxiety that so persistently befell and defined his relationship with his father, an uncomplicated and self-satisfied man from the looks of his black and white photo. Kafka, 36, begins the letter pensively, admitting from the outset that the project of reconciliation, for which the letter in part represents, is likely impossible, as even the fundamental causes of the rift can't be formulated or fully understood.
“Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, [. . . .] And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning”
Kafka's inkling or notion here that the subject matter itself is too big and amorphous, that it somehow goes beyond anyone's "power of reasoning" will be somewhat of a running theme, a charitable theme too as it's seemingly Kafka's first gesture at an olive branch. The logic: "Hell, we're both 'guiltless' in the dissolution; neither the son nor the father is at fault for their mutual growing apart." Had this been Franz's principal thesis or sole message to his father, the terse letter would've undoubtedly been read by Hermann. But as it stood, Kafka's initial handwritten missive totaling a staggering 103 pages, the letter never reached his father; instead, his mother, Julie, likely after a sober read through, returned it to her son. The letter, after all, didn't resemble anything like a fig leaf. Rather, it was more akin to a rite of exorcism or psychic purging, an attempted expulsion of all the guilt Kafka had accrued over the years.
“It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this knowing what ‘children’s gratitude’ is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with extravagant ideas.”
Nowhere else has Kafka been more relatable. So much so, in fact, that I'd recommend the text even to those who are not particularly a fan of Kafka's, especially to those who perhaps had to read The Metamorphosis as part of their high school required reading and to those with a liberal arts degree who may have been goaded into using "Kafkaesque" as a synonym for the bureacratic and oppressive. Whatever preconceptions you may have about Franz Kafka, Letter to the Father will unsettle you in its familiarity. Not a member of the literati? Not to worry. As literary and "meta" as the prose is, Kafka's chief aim here doesn't concern the circumscriptions of aesthetic beauty. Rather, he's after something else, something entirely more enigmatic and familial.
In sprawling fashion, Kafka sought and succeeded in articulating that which refused articulation. So immediate and intimate is the century old document that one will reflexively find oneself asking how in the world the disjunction between him and his father will ever be bridged and repaired. And, in turn, without even registering it, one will mirror the text, asking oneself, "Will the gulf between my father and myself always remain a gulf? A chasm? A vast ocean with no visible land in sight?" Kafka's blistering conclusion: Yes, the gap will remain. A growing rapprochement or detente simply isn't in the cards. Not if the patriarch resembles hot-tempered Hermann, "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, [and] worldly dominance[.]"
A review by Hey Venus Radio volunteer Maxi Kim —the author of One Break, A Thousand Blows.