Metamorphoses

Watroba, a Kafka scholar at Oxford, deliberately skips the standard cradle-to-grave biography and instead tracks how Kafka has been read, misread, and repurposed across a century, ending, notably, in Seoul, considering Kafka's odd afterlife in Korean pop culture. Reviewers responded to the global-reception angle as the book's real contribution: rather than adding another interpretation of what Kafka "meant," Watroba is more interested in why his specific brand of alienation keeps getting reactivated by readers in wildly different contexts. Some reviewers missed the narrative pull of straight biography, but most found the trade-off worthwhile.