In his diaries Franz Kafka listed among his failings his timidity, reserve, talkativeness, and half-heartedness. “There is a goal, but no way. What we call a way is hesitation.” These notions are uncannily captured by Lydia Davis, in addition to her being able to duplicate the voice of Kafka’s prose. Her idiosyncratic short fictions, some only one sentence long, earned her the International Booker Prize. (Davis is equally noted as a translator of Proust, Flaubert, and Blanchot, and her essays on translating and on learning to translate Dutch and Norwegian are among my favorites.) In her recent book, Davis admitted to Kafka’s diaries providing an inspiration for her own work.
The premise of ‘Kafka Cooks Dinner’ is that he is preparing to cook for Milena Jesenská, with whom he had a passionate epistolary affair, which broke off after she refused to leave her husband. It would help the reader to have some knowledge of this (see Letters to Milena) and Kafka’s tortured and tortuous relationships with women, especially Felice Bauer to whom he was engaged twice, yet unable to follow through. Rereading the story made me smile continuously at Davis’s wit and ability to write so believably in Kafka’s voice.
Preparing the menu is as if “I were being forced to hammer a nail into stone, as if I were both the one hammering and also the nail.” Kafka stresses out over the benefits and downsides to potato salad or beet salad, and whether or not to add beef. “Why am I a human being? I ask myself – what an extremely vague condition.” Yes, indeed! As the evening progresses “I lamented my waning strength. I lamented being born, I lamented the light of the sun.” The story is a sheer delight from beginning to end. The reader is left in suspenseful anxiety, much as Kafka is, in anticipation of what can only be a desultory outcome to this fraught culinary adventure.
In The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis, Picador, 2009
A Personal Anthology 