Zámek – Kafka Franz (2025)

An illustrated edition of Kafka's masterpiece featuring several dozen images by Argentine painter and illustrator Luis Scafati, equipped with an extensive collection of Kafka's drawings, which his friend Max Brod transported from Prague to Palestine in March 1939 and which remained largely inaccessible to the public until 2019. Kafka's enigmatic novel, which tells the story of surveyor K. who arrives in a village beneath a mysterious castle and vainly attempts to gain recognition and establish contact with the castle officials in order to perform his work, invites countless interpretations and can be read in the broadest sense as a grotesque parable about the futility of human endeavor in the face of the world's impenetrability or, even more generally, as a metaphor for the human condition. As Jiří Stromšík points out in the afterword, any narrower, 'one-sided' interpretations, whether relying on a religious-mystical, socio-political, or psychological key, can be misleading and miss the nature of Kafka's texts, whose essence is ambiguity and openness of meaning. Our edition includes a collection of Kafka's drawings published for the first time in our country. When Max Brod fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939, he took with him not only...