LETTERS TO KAFKA, introduction to a life unjustly ignored in Anglophone literature

LETTERS TO KAFKA
CHRISTINE ESTIMA
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 paperback, available now

Bookends with Mattea Roach interview with Author Estima.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.

In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story The Stoker from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.

Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Modeling to a world unwilling to see what principled resistance to authoritarianism looks like, Milena Jesenská could be no more perfect a subject to study in 2025. Christine Estima has done it for us, and presented her findings in an involving, intense novel of Milena's life. The incident igniting her rise to resistance is a simple and practical one: she needs income. Her then-husband can't, in 1919 Vienna, provide for them. Having very recently read Kafka's stories and being moved deeply by them, Milena writes to request permission to translate them into Czech. Her aim is to get income...the result is to become utterly, passionately entwined with Kafka. It was not primarily a physical affair, only two known meetings, but a deep and consuming love.

The story here, however, is Jesenská...the woman, the intellectual, the object of desire for many members of the Vienna Secession. Reading this book of her own words, stitched into the author's gap-filling prose, I was unable to conceive of a good reason this vibrant and impassioned liver of life and lover of justice was so unfamiliar to me. I know the reason...she's a woman, misogyny's polarizing lenses filter those people out...but talk about stupid! Writing Milena Jesenská out of History is a wrong I hope we will see righted more and more. A resister of Nazism, not a Jew but friend to Jews and accomplice to their escape from certain death, person whose life trajectory includes Ravensbrück, is someone to be celebrated loudly and often. Never more than now.

The mind that created cultural touchstones Gregor Samsa and K., that saw Reality in place of consensus reality, said to Milena: "Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead. - FK". A spirit that can elicit this deep and passionate love from one whose life is known by him to be quite short is one worth knowing and celebrating.

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN, brutally honest recounting of the reality of femicide

THE SIMPLE ART OF KILLING A WOMAN
PATRÍCIA MELO (tr. Sophie Lewis)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From best-selling Brazilian crime novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression

By turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.

To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance―and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.

The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know a book has said something profound, moving, and honest when more about fifteen hundred Goodreads reviews are very positive to four hundred profoundly negative. Goodreads ain't the Land of Woke, yet four times as many people chose to express a positive opinion of this story of violence and murder against women as bothered to bash it.

I'm praising it, too. The way Author Melo weaves magical, intensely sensual words...

Death has been kind to me, I thought. I haven't been run over by a lorry. I haven't fallen to a stray bullet. I have not been hastened toward death—rather, death has only dreamed of me; it has only knocked at my door. Tap, tap, tap. "I'm thinking of coming for you tonight at nightfall," death had said.
–and–
It seemed to be raising a piece of me that had been forgotten, something stifled inside me, a piece that on coming free levered up another, and so on and so on, down to the last lost piece, the furthest fallen, as good as buried—the one called "mother."

...into lovely images as well as wields word-scalpels as she detachedly discusses the murder of women simply for being (or presenting as) women is brutal and effective in conveying the sickness at the heart of femicide.

You never imagine that a guy like this, a Wittgenstein reader and yoga fan, will hit you in the face at a lawyers’ New Year’s Eve party. But the statistics show that it happens a lot. And that lots of men don’t stop at a slap. They’d actually rather kill you.
–and–
The conclusion I reached by my second week in court was this: we women are dying like flies. You men get hammered and kill us. Men want to fuck and kill us. Men get enraged and kill us. Men want a bit of fun and kill us. Men discover our lovers and kill us. We leave them and men kill us. Men get another lover and kill us. Men come home tired after work and kill us.

It is as Author Melo has Carla say: "It doesn't matter where you are or what social class you belong to and it doesn't matter what you do for a living. It's dangerous being a woman."

From many directions, for reasons and for no reason at all, it is dangerous to be a woman.

That simple, statistically verifiable truth is really all the impetus I think you should need to get and read this book.

I couldn't offer a fifth star, as the subject matter alone merited, because the reading experience was not well-integrated; the tonal shifts were effective but were also overused. The characters aren't really developed because there is so very much to say about the reason we-the-reader are here; but that means, at times, we-the-reader don't get the real horror-movie-esque impact only the documentary, evidentiary disgust and outrage.

A story to admire, to absorb and retain lessons from; not one to follow your spouse or equivalent around, reading bits and snatches to.

UNTRACEABLE, ex-Soviet thriller author slyly pokes powerful people in the ribs..."I saw that!" with deniability

UNTRACEABLE
SERGEI LEBEDEV (tr. Antonina W. Bouis)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 2018, a former Russian secret agent and his daughter were poisoned with a lethal neurotoxin that left them slumped over on a British park bench in critical condition. The story of who did it, and how these horrendous contaminants were developed, captivates and terrifies in equal measure. It has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev’s latest page-turning novel.

At its center is a scheming chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. He becomes consumed by guilt over the death of his wife, the first accidental victim of his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom, and the deaths of hundreds of test subjects. After he defects from the Soviet Union to spend his “retirement” years in the West, two Russian secret agents are dispatched to assassinate him.

In this fast-paced, genre-bending novel, Lebedev weaves tension-filled pages of stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots, the Chechen Wars, to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction and control. Lebedev, one of Russia’s most important and exciting writers, has never been better.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I do not know why this story did not sell a million copies on release, or why so many highly respected outlets' praise (The New York Times, Library Journal, CrimeReads) did not result in bestsellerdom and a residency on top of the lists. It couldn't be the quiet discouragement of Powerful People, of course not...but somehow y'all slept on this well-told, excitingly plotted, extremely timely thriller.

What do you mean, "so did you"? No of course I didn't! I had...COVID...oh yeah...forgot about that.

Time to rectify that.

Let's start with the prose:

Kalitan felt uncomfortable. The pushy women, the noisy, grumbling line, the obnoxious kids annoyed him. The boys suddenly ran off and whispered to the adults pointing at the car. Kalitin turned around and saw that the bouncing ride had loosened the tarp. The sun shone on the monkey's dead face, yellow teeth bared in the pink mouth; shiny chrome-green flies crawled over the black fur.

A Goodreads friend, herself a novelist, used this passage to illustrate why the story did not work for her. I'm the opposite, in this case. As a reader of thrillers I want to see, to get into my eyes, the scenes; it's the m.o. of the thriller to be cinematic and evoke a response with urgency not build-up in most situations. I got my cues...yellow, pink interiors of vulnerability; metallic green, black, shiny exteriors of impermeability. My eyes are there.

It isn't going to work for everyone, but what does? Translator Bouis did not overcomplicate or undersell at any turn the intent of a thriller. I really got involved, as a result, in the way the story presents the conflict of guilt and culpability as reluctant internalization of results in physical reality.

Poisoning someone by premeditated action would come across as depraved, indifferent, if done in this framework. Instead this story is about creating conditions by one's curiosity and labor to resolve that curiosity in physical form that result in...entirely without one's own involvement...the greatest possible harm to a stranger. Think it's implausible? Go watch Oppenheimer, and/or read American Prometheus.

What works best in this way of presenting the story is (for me) the sheer number of SNAFUs and FUMTUs that plague attempts to "neutralize the threat" that is Kalitin's continued existence, after his creation is revealed to be the cause of death of politically inconvenient people. While he is not-really trying to deal with knowledge that processing would render horrifyingly painful, those trying to make their orders from on high real get more and more tripped up, screwed up, and outright thwarted by...well, everything.

It is always the case that ability to act outpaces ability to reflect. Kalitin is now reflecting, reluctantly, on his actions. We are not, thank goodness, subjected to his self-justifications. We see actions and results, we perceive probable responses, but we are never in the muck that is this morally compromised, no bankrupt, man's head. I think listening to a human's self-exculpatory inner chatter is pointless and painful.

A reckoning is a cathartic experience in life and in reading. Very, very seldom do reckonings come cleanly defined, with sharp edges and self-evident results. Fiction tries for that completeness at its peril, as this is fantasy fulfillment. Would you expect a Russian author, in the time of Little Vladdy Pu-Pu, to attempt that kind of blame assignment?