Franz Kafka’s unfinished final novel, The Castle, stands out as the most sophisticated and elusive of the author’s abstruse and infinitely generous corpus. The enigmatic tale relates the tribulations of the land surveyor, K., summoned in error to a Central European village governed by the inept bureaucratic retainers of Count Westwest. A century after Kafka’s death, our own generation’s master of the Kafkaesque form, Seth Rogoff, revisits this same literary landscape in his deeply unsettling, insightful, and equally elusive work of the same name. Rogoff, a well-regarded translator of Kafka, in addition to a literary author, has the audacity to engage with one of the past century’s most inimitable geniuses—and the skill to create a response worthy of its subject.
The Castle: A Novel is the third and potentially final volume of the author’s intertextual Sy Kirschbaum trilogy, following upon First, the Raven: A Preface (2017) and The Kirschbaum Lectures (2023). These three novels follow a fugue of plotlines across centuries. In one thread, set in present-day Mitteleuropa, expatriate translator Sy Kirschbaum travels to the Czech village of Z. as part of an effort to assist his lover, Julia, recover a set of medieval religious texts, associated with the sixteenth century Jewish-Italian essayist, Jacob Rodriga, which serve up an alternate account of the Cain-Abel fratricide. In another strand, Sidney Keter, a minor figure in Kirschbaum celebrated translation of Jan Horàk’s samizdat, Blue, Red, Grey, flees to New York City from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 only to see the sole remaining copy of his masterpiece, The Book of Moonlight, purloined by a dissident anarchist, Esther Bird. A third fiber recounts the arrival in 1922 of “The Stranger K” in Z., where he faces interrogation from the village secretary, Momus, who ultimately discovers that his quarry bears the curse of God.
Other narratives weave thought the text as well: we follow a fragmenting intellectual, Daniel Cohen, who is institutionalized alongside Kirschbaum at a Nervenklinik and later reveals to him an underground Berlin laboratory where an obsessed chemist, Dr. Kaesbohrer, traces subterranean tremors to arrive at a “precise mathematical equation to represent the collapse of freedom ….” We also encounter Kirschbaum’s childhood neighbor, Martin Dellman, author of a novel about a writer of the same name whose retirement is interrupted by a mad prophet, Nahum Griggs, who predicts the arrival of the same mysterious Esther Bird. We even meet the man who resides above Dr. Kaesbohrer’s future laboratory, a tubercular young writer by the name of Franz Kafka. Rogoff once again proves himself a master storyteller with a gift for choreographing numerous characters with ease through wide swaths of time, across international borders and among overlapping storylines. Like Balzac and Faulkner, he fashions a “closed system” of revenant characters and distinctive terrain.
The various filaments of The Castle converge upon present-day Z., 18 kilometers northeast of the ski resort of Spindelmühle. The village is now a ghost town: desolate, unmapped, frozen like Pompeii in the amber of a lost moment. Kirschbaum (maybe an alter ego of various K.’s who appear in the text) sets out in search of clues for Z.’s destruction—a quest which ultimately, inevitably, leads him to attempt to breach the deserted castle above. He views the castle as “the heart of the great textual universe” which houses what he has “been painstakingly trying to discover for decades: the core of a tradition of radical otherness, a tradition that challenges tradition, a tradition of rupture, disruption, and revolt against the thousands upon thousands of mechanisms that have attempted to restrain these counter-stories with the straitjacket of an intolerably limited meaning.” Alas, the edifice also appears, both literally and figuratively, “unreachable.”
A central theme of Rogoff’s work is apocalyptic destruction: the Jewish holocaust that will claim Kafka’s mistress, Milena Jesenská, reprised as Kirschbaum’s love-interest at the asylum; the annihilation of Biblical Zion by a justice-seeking Cain; the instantaneous eradication of the village of Z. under opaque circumstances. Whether Rogoff is invoking a warning, forecasting an inevitability, or problematizing and dismantling a theology, remains among the text’s relentless and unresolved—possibly unresolvable—conundrums. Yet he manages to distill his message into an elegiac paradox that surfaces as a leitmotif throughout his oeuvre: The crows claim that a single crow could destroy heaven. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.
At one level, The Castle is a postmodern hermeneutic detective tale in the spirit of A. S. Byatt’s Possession. At another level, the layered text toys with the very concept of postmodern narrative in the manner of John Fowles or Umberto Eco. Yet none of his cleverly-executed literary hijinks detract from Rogoff’s talent for spinning a suspense-filled page-turner of a yarn. His contrarian retellings of the Cain legend, including one in which Cain is female and resists being raped by Abel and a second in which Cain’s love of animals leads to a rejected offering, reflect some of the strongest old-fashioned storytelling in contemporary fiction.
The volumes of Rogoff’s trilogy, taken individually, offer compelling, exigent explorations of both metaphysics and narrative. Together, they prove far grander: epic investigations of meaning in a world beyond both reason and faith. In short, these texts, of which The Castle appears to be a brilliant and disquieting culmination, exude a canonical eminence. In aggregate, they rank among the most original and important novels of ideas of the first quarter of the twenty-first century: erudite, lyrical, cutting-edge, and destined to become future classics.
The Castle, by Seth Rogoff. Tuscaloosa: FC2, October 2024. $18.95, paper.
Jacob M. Appel is the author of twenty books including Einstein’s Beach House and Shaving with Occam. More at: jacobmappel.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 