Monthly Archive for September, 2010

From Elif Batuman at The New York Times…

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.

The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats. More…

From n+1…

In April 1922, D.W. Griffith traveled to London to promote Orphans of the Storm, his epic of the French Revolution. To a skeptical Times interviewer he described the literary origin of his signature contribution to film technique: the “‘break’ in the narrative, a shifting of the story from one group of characters to another group.” As Sergei Eisenstein observed on discovering the exchange, “Griffith arrived at montage through the method of parallel action”—cross-cutting—“and he was led to the idea of parallel action by—Dickens!” Motion Picture Studio, to which the young Alfred Hitchcock was a contributor, thought Griffith’s visit had made plain “for the first time the all-importance of the director to the films for which he is responsible.” Soon after, the Manchester Guardian’s Caroline Lejeune, later part of Hitchcock’s circle, noted the cults that had gathered around certain directors on the basis of a few films “built on the same lines.” Once canonized, she wrote, “every little gleam of beauty is magnified a hundredfold,” and their work, “even in embryo, will be enwrapped in a legend of quality which it would take a very serious blunder to destroy.” More…