We might divide the pieces collected in The Lost Writings into gems and shards—the former seemingly conceptually complete, the latter obviously broken-off—each with their own particular kinds of obscurity ... the pieces making up The Lost Writings do not offer a new or more richly understood Kafka so much as a concentrated expression of the same dynamics, motifs, and obsessions that occupy his longer and more familiar works. Compressed and largely stripped of the intricacy that distinguishes the latter, these fragments help us appreciate how much of what makes a piece of writing Kafka’s lives at the level of the voice, the situation, the posture, the incident, the line. They also illuminate the fragmentary features of the less fragmented writings ... The journey through The Lost Writings unsettles this confidence not only by introducing us to new or less recognizable expressions of his project, but also by putting us into repeated, immediate contact with Kafka’s own self-doubt, which gleams in every bracketed ellipsis ...
... superbly rendered in English by the poet and translator Michael Hofmann. Given its exciting title, one opens the book expecting to find texts that had previously been missing. Yet, as Stach admits in the epilogue, all of the so-called 'lost writings' found within have long been readily available in German ... the vast majority of texts on offer in this short book—really a compilation of drafts or segments of stories—had already appeared in English and other languages, even if in out-of-print collections ... Perhaps I should be generous: Translation of a text into a second language can surely lead to a sense of discovery for readers with no access to the original. But the fact remains that these texts can be construed as lost only if popular Anglophone publishing markets control the terms of reality; that is, writings come to exist only once they become readily accessible to the English-speaking general reader ... Admittedly, my frustration with the framing of The Lost Writings is compounded by the reality that serious readers of Kafka have in fact been waiting for the release of material long kept from us ... The Lost Writings gives us fragments wrenched from context and presented without any explanation of their place in his notebooks, diaries, or collection of letters. One might defend this procedure as an effort to replicate the sense of disorientation and loss of context that Kafka registers in his work: historical dispossession, dissolution of ground and gravity, forgotten histories and unreadable handbooks, wayward travels with indefinite destinations, communications that falter or fail. But on the contrary, I would argue, the refusal to contextualize Kafka’s writing within its own history simply exploits this disorientation, trivializing the loss of time and place that marks his work ... Despite this mangling, the works in this volume do bring us into contact with provocative forms of dislocation.
The Lost Writings, a flickering collection of broken-off scenes and incidents culled from Kafka’s papers by biographer Reiner Stach and translated by poet Michael Hofmann, offers an intimate new look at the refractory relation between Kafka’s self-conception as literature incarnate and his artistic output ... The unwavering tone of this material — the unassuming invitation to listen on equal footing, as though to one’s own, distantly familiar mind — stands in marked contrast to the uninhibited caprices of its content ... Fortunately, the singularly microscopic, diaristic perspective afforded by this collection reinvigorates the struggle against this temptation. For on display here is not so much the work itself as Kafka at work ... The Lost Writings bears witness to the tremendous imaginative lengths to which Kafka ventures to avoid directly asserting his individuality ... Kafka’s ineluctable confrontation with unfinishability is here crystallized into a solemnly digestible museum exhibit.
