America

First edition in English. 8vo. Pp. xii, 300, [4 (publisher's adverts)]. Publisher's maroon cloth, lettered in black to spine. Top edge stained yellow. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, with an Introductory Note by Edwin Muir and an Afterword by Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod. First English-language edition, the presumed second issue with title stamped in black.

The third in the author's "Trilogie der Einsamkeit" [Trilogy of Loneliness], according to Brod, to be published, yet the first to be penned. Also known as Der Verschollene or The Man Who Disappeared, it was originally issued in 1927 by Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich. It is thought to have been inspired by the apocryphal story of one of Kafka's cousins who at the tender age of sixteen was shipped off to America, after impregnating the family maid. In Kafka's version of events, seventeen-year-old Karl Rossman leads a peripatetic life in the land of opportunity amid extremes of wealth and poverty with his innocence inviting constant exploitation.

Though the author never visited the country, his picaresque tale does capture the very 'idea' of America in its uncanny depiction of an ever-changing landscape of oversized constructs, peopled by inhabitants in thrall to speed and technology. The uncompleted manuscript comes full circle with the classic Kafka trope of the scorned individual pleading his innocence in front of remote and mysterious figures of authority.

[Mellown D32]