Lovers Of Franz K by Burhan Sonmez

translated from the original Kurdish by Sami Hezil.

It feels a little strange to be talking about a(nother) book on the subject of the legacies of the departed, especially since this definitely takes the opposite tack of yesterday’s What Happens After? That book talked about grief and acceptance, whereas this speaks of guilt and vengeance. Weirdly, those have also been preoccupations of mine, which might go some way to explaining the reading hangover I’ve been feeling recently.

Lovers Of Franz K goes a step further from my personal dilemmas to speak of the impact of writers on their audiences. The Franz of the title is the celebrated author Franz Kafka, ofc, whose will requested that his unpublished works be destroyed after his death. His best friend and heir Max Brod went ahead and had them published anyway. The literary world was torn: should Brod have honored Kafka’s wishes, or had he been right to share these last glimmers of genius with the world?

The book itself opens with the arrest of a young man named Ferdy Kaplan, after the fatal shooting of a student in 1960s West Berlin. Ferdy is Turkish and assumed to be an anti-Semitic radical hiding others of his cell. He mocks the interrogating Police Commissioner Muller’s lines of inquiry, even as he expresses regret for what he’s done.

Over the course of several interviews, we learn the real reason for Ferdy’s actions, as well as his history and the sociopolitical contexts of the time and place in which the book is set. Kafka’s life and legacy make a fascinating counterpoint to the goings-on, underscoring how government machineries that don’t take into account the humanity and complexity of its people only foster more of the discontent and violence they claim to want to eradicate. It’s no coincidence that Ferdy and Kafka share the same initials, as they both narrate the disorienting circumstances they find themselves in, often through little fault of their own.

What I personally found most interesting about this novella was how well I felt it would have worked as a script. Most of the book is written in the form of a dialog between Ferdy and Muller, with occasional interjections from other characters. I kept thinking of how interesting this would be to stage, how actors would breathe life into the somewhat flat words on the page. I’m not sure if that was the author’s intent, but it’s certainly an intriguing option.

That flatness, ultimately, is what made me not love a book that I definitely liked. I learned so much from it — it’s a wonderfully immersive look at a very particular era and milieu — but it definitely requires more than the usual emotional input from a reader. Definitely recommended for avowed fans of Kafka tho, and for anyone interested in the student politics swirling through Germany, Turkey, France and Israel in the 1960s.

Lovers Of Franz K by Burhan Sonmez was published April 1 2025 by Other Press and is available from all good booksellers, including