Franz Kafka, the centennial of whose death occurred this year, was not much of a traveller. Except for a few short trips in Europe, he rarely left his native Prague, where he worked as an office clerk for various insurance companies. He wrote mostly at night.
Kafka’s literature, if not his life, is full of remote settings. Given his interest in regions such as feudal Asia in “The Great Wall of China” or the United States in the eponymous Amerika, it is tempting to ascribe him a certain flair for distant places. In his travel novel Richard and Samuel, however, he redirects his attention to Central Europe with the explicit purpose of depicting some of its cities with “the freshness and significance that is often wrongly attributed to exotic regions alone,” as is said in the prologue.
There were two things that had been—prejudicially—dissuading me from reading Richard and Samuel. First, it was co-written—a collaboration between Kafka and his friend (and eventual literary executor) Max Brod. They had met in 1902 at a lecture on Schopenhauer held by Brod, and the book, a diary novel that juxtaposes the travel notes of two estranged friends, was inspired by trips they actually made together to Switzerland, Italy, and France. They both co-wrote the entries of each character, so it would be difficult to attribute any passage to either Kafka or Brod exclusively.
Travelling together must have been more pleasant than writing together, because they never finished writing Richard and Samuel, which is the second reason I put off reading it. The only chapter we have, “The First Long Train Ride,” takes the narrators from Prague to Zurich via Plzen and Munich.
An unfinished one-chapter novel—and, so, barely a novel at all—where I could not expect Kafka’s style to be either discernible or prevalent did not sound especially appealing to me. Yet, I was curious. The prospect of a Kafkian—if not Kafkaesque—travel novel sounded interesting. It was also good fun to engage with the questions prompted by reading what one may call a sheer fragment of a novel. The category of “fragment”, after all, is a particularly blurry one. Is Richard and Samuel a fragment because it is too short? I am sure there are haiku anthologies with fewer words. Or is it because it is shorter than intended—because it was never finished according to its authors’ original plans? If so, both Virgil’s Aeneid and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 are fragments too, which seems wrong.
Richard and Samuel certainly was at an earlier stage of completion compared to the Aeneid or 2666. It would be difficult not to experience it as a fragment, the beginning of a project that never reached its end. But I would not know where to draw the exact line between the sketch and the fully realized painting, so to speak.
The diary—even when in pieces—is a deeply intimate literary genre. This is used to great effect in Richard and Samuel, where the conflicting viewpoints of both narrators are written in the first person and intermingled. They disagree on their appreciation of the people and landscapes they encounter; they talk poorly of one another. A couple of lines away from the end, Richard says, wistfully: “Samuel was not enough for me that morning.” This disharmony has essentially no effect in the plot, but it affects the reader, who—unlike the characters themselves—does see the whole, saddening plight.
It is curious that, because these private thoughts expressed by Samuel and Richard concern the falling out of their relationship, they end up portraying the disintegration of their intimacy. They write in detail, secretly and sincerely, about how uncomfortable they feel during the trip, and unknowingly showcase just how little they understand one another. Through the conveyance of rather personal feelings, a creeping anonymity enters the picture—the moment when their bond of friendship finally breaks apart.
According to the outline of the novel described by Kafka and Brod in the prologue, after a series of disagreements, Richard and Samuel are supposed to reconcile and decide to join efforts in an artistic endeavor. But we only have the first chapter, and so we are only allowed to witness the collapse of intimacy, not its restoration.
I would not necessarily say I enjoyed reading Richard and Samuel. Not so much because it is a sad book, but rather because some of its episodes feel unimportant and unengaging (even for an incomplete work) both in their content and regarding the language in which they are expressed. This was especially the case during the initial third of the novel.
Still, besides the reflections that its form and incompleteness elicited, this unintended opuscule gifted me two images of startling melancholy, as often happens with travel memories. The first: two friends on a car trip through Munich with a young woman—a Wagner fan—who does not really want to be there and whom they will never see again, and whom they will miss. The second: late at night, a man leaning on the railing of his porch, the lights of his writing room on behind him “as if he had only come out to cool his head before going to sleep.”
