Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Princess Daisy as an allegory of the voyage of the soul, or Three Weeks as a nineteenth-century Pilgrim’s
Progress). This we realized back in Buenos Aires, together with that early sense of freedom: that the
authority of the reader is never limitless. “The limits of interpretation,” Umberto Eco has noted in a useful
epigram, “coincide with the rights of the text.”
Emil Filla’s A Reader of Dostoevsky. (photo credit 6.2)
Ernst Pawel, at the end of his lucid biography of Kafka, written in 1984, observed that “the literature
dealing with Kafka and his work currently comprises an estimated 15,000 titles in most of the world’s
major languages.” Kafka has been read literally, allegorically, politically, psychologically. That readings
always outnumber the texts that breed them is a trite observation, and yet something revealing about the
creative nature of the act of reading lies in the fact that one reader can despair and another can laugh at
exactly the same page. My daughter Rachel read Metamorphosis at thirteen and thought it humorous;
Gustav Janouch, Kafka’s friend, read it as a religious and ethical parable; Bertolt Brecht read it as the
work of “the only true Bolshevist writer”; the Hungarian critic György Lukács read it as the typical
product of a decadent bourgeois; Borges read it as a retelling of the paradoxes of Zeno; the French critic
Marthe Robert read it as an example of the German language at its clearest; Vladimir Nabokov read it
(partly) as an allegory on adolescent Angst. The fact is that Kafka’s stories, nourished by Kafka’s reading
experience, offer and take away, at the same time, the illusion of understanding; they undermine, as it
were, the craft of Kafka the writer in order to satisfy Kafka the reader.
“Altogether,” Kafka wrote in 1904 to his friend Oskar Pollak, “I think we ought to read only books that bite
and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother
reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy
if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we
need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than
we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human
presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
An explanatory page from the Codex Seraphinianus. (photo credit 6.3)

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