Who Owns Kafka? (2011)
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
That's a very strange auction strategy. You would think that a proper cataloguing would increase the amount you would earn, and it could be done by a hired gun for cheap (since Kafka experts would clamor for access). From a game theory perspective, refusal to disclose contents should, by the 'unraveling' argument, drastically lower the value of the papers to rational bidders since it is a strong indication that the contents are worth a lot less than prospective bidders previously estimated before the refusal (since if the contents were as valuable or more valuable, the owners would have incentive to reveal to ensure the price or raise it; absence of evidence is evidence of absence).
One possibility is that they are counting on bidders being irrational and desperate, in which case refusing to disclose keeps valuations irrationally high and exploits the winner's curse; possibly the strategy here is to make the Israeli National Library overpay because it is committed by ethnonationalism to pay whatever price necessary, and revealing the contents risks either public criticism of the National Library overpaying or scaring away other bidders as they learn the papers are boring & losing leverage over the National Library.
To some, $2 million would be a bargain for, say, a new Kafka novel.
The conspiracy theorist side of me has often wondered whether maybe Kafka did it intentionally. Intentionally left his novels unfinished, intentionally started a legend that he requested them to be destroyed unpublished, etc. It would certainly resonate with the tones and themes that permeate his works. Perhaps he himself realized that no ending could possibly suit a novel like "The Castle" better than the unfinished lack-of-ending he gave it, which makes our hearts yearn so strongly for an ending, and which is such a great parallel with the futility of the novel itself.
"But Judge Kopelman Pardo rejected Ms. Hoffe’s claim that the papers were a gift from Mr. Brod to her mother, instead viewing them as a trust she was to administer. The judge noted that Mr. Brod’s 1948 will instructed that his archive go to a “public Jewish library or archive in Palestine,” and that he later specified Hebrew University, where Israel’s national library is housed."
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/woman-mu...
EDIT: As absurd as it sounds, I had similar feelings when reading his letters to Milena. I read that book twice, it's one of those books I really like but I had similar problems mentioned above.
The Castle: The only difficulty here is some conversations take forever (probably because they were never revised). I'd suggest just plowing through them the first time, your eyes might glaze over and you'll miss stuff in them but it's ok, you can pick more stuff up on later readings. I've read The Castle many times and I still pick up new stuff from it.
The Trial: There's really only one chapter that's difficult, the penultimate chapter set in the cathedral. You could literally just skip it, if you're having trouble with it. You'll miss some self-contained goodies like "Before The Law", but you can always come back later. It has been said that except for the first and last chapters, most chapters in The Trial can be rearranged and read in whatever order you like. I seem to recall someone even created some sort of physical version of the book where you could literally swap chapters around.
The Trial was the only thing I read from Kafka that I found kinda meh and boring-ish, again made it a bit more than half way. I tried reading The Trial at least 3 times, maybe more, with same faith every time. (I eventually learned its ending in a literature class, but given other works of Kafka, it was very predictable). I'll give it a shot again and maybe skip chapters where I lose focus and come back later.
If you're looking for entertainment value then this advice doesn't necessarily apply.
I think the best thing is to just take your time--all of Kafka's prose writing can fit in less than a thousand pages, so there's no reason to try to fly through it. Treat it like a nice liquor--just a taste at the bottom of the glass, not the whole bottle. And all works benefit from rereading, but his especially.
"LinkedIn's" Kafka is open sourced under Apache and has been for a long time.
> According to a Quora post from 2014, Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he liked Kafka's work Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka