If you enjoyed the Spectator's podcast, why not subscribe to the magazine as well?

You can get 12 weeks of The Spectator for just £12, plus a free £20 £10,000 or weight raise voucher.

If you go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

This is a podcast-only deal, and we hope you take us up on it.

Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week we're going to be talking about Franz Kafka.

It's 100 years since the great Czech writer died.

And I'm very privileged to be joined by two major scholars of his work. There is Mark Harmon,

who's just edited and translated afresh as selected stories of Kafka for Harvard University Press,

and Ross Benjamin, whose new book is Franz Kafka Diaries,

which is a monumental edit of Kafka's Diaries and notebooks in an previously unexplicated form that hasn't yet been seen in English translation until now. Welcome both. I'd like start by asking what's probably a question

that's going to elicit a groan, but Kafka is one of those writers like Byron and Wilde, who's

attracted an adjective, and we talk about things being Kafkaesque. I'm wondering, both you,

how useful is that conception of him as a prism through which to see this writer?

Is it a narrowing or does it capture something that's integral to his work?

Well, I would say it captures something.

Disorientation, there are various ways of putting it,

but a feeling of being out of place in a world that's increasingly impersonal,

bureaucratic, mechanized. It's something that a feeling and an atmosphere that seems distinctly

modern and that has somehow attached itself to Kafka. But there's far more, of course, in Kafka than that.

And that's why it can be a bit narrowing,

...