Photo: Kelvin Ma

MINI-Q&A

Haunted by Kafka

The specter hovering over Jay Cantor’s new collection of stories, Forgiving the Angel (Knopf), is Franz Kafka. He glides in and out of the lives of the characters, which are mostly based on real people who had intimate ties with the writer. Cantor, a professor of English at Tufts and author of Krazy Kat and other novels, has been reading Kafka ever since high school in New York, and has taught his work for years.

I recently spoke with Cantor about the genesis of his latest work.

WHAT WAS YOUR GOAL IN WRITING THESE STORIES? I wanted to explore what it meant to have an encounter with an angel, Kafka being the angel. Everyone who knew him was struck by his extraordinary honesty and his inability to comfort himself with illusions. Like Max Brod [Kafka’s friend and literary executor who ignored the author’s request to burn his unpublished works, and went on to make Kafka posthumously famous], they could never live up to what it meant to encounter Kafka, nor could they forget him. And that interested me.

More deeply, the book is, as the novelist David Shields told me in a letter, about grief in general, how to deal with somebody who’s gone and who one has loved—someone who one feels, perhaps because of the grief, is part of the angelic order. Why I was moved to write about that I couldn’t tell you. But for me that’s what the book is about.

THE BOOK IS SUBTITLED “FOUR STORIES FOR FRANZ KAFKA.” WHY IS THAT? I feel a kind of kinship with Kafka. There’s a kind of terror in his stories. I want to comfort him and show him that I understand and share his terror. Or maybe I think he shares mine—I’m not sure; one of those two.

DO YOU THINK KAFKA WOULD APPRECIATE WHAT YOU’VE DONE? That’s a nightmare of a question. I shall spend the rest of my life wondering about that. —TAYLOR MCNEIL