Written in a sequence of short prose sections, Kafka’s Son moves through early twentieth-century Prague, Kafka’s relationship with his father Hermann, Jewish identity, language and exile.

The book was left among Borbély’s manuscripts at his death and retains that unfinished, unstable quality, despite now being reflected upon as a masterpiece. 

Kafka is used as a double, a mirror of sorts, that Borbély can think about fathers and sons, Eastern Europe and inherited shame. Its voices slide between Kafka, Hermann, imagined scenes, biographical fragments and Borbély’s own experience; the boundary between literary criticism, fiction and self-portrait keeps dissolving. We see over time, how a person can finally know another, even within a family, and how writers, thinkers, the dead in general, become containers for people who come after them. The result is melancholic, sometimes dreamlike and quietly brutal, with Kafka’s famous paternal conflict widening into a meditation on Eastern European history and the long afterlife of familial damage.

Edition / condition: Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2023. First English edition. Originally published in Hungarian as Kafka fia. Translated by Ottilie Mulzet. Paperback. Very light shelf wear to covers and edges; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Near fine condition.