Michael Kumpfmüller's novel traces Kafka's last year with Dora Diamant

Michael Kumpfmüller's novel 'La Splendeur de la vie' (Albin Michel, translated by Bernard Kreiss) recounts Franz Kafka's final year, from his meeting with Dora Diamant at the Baltic resort of Müritz to his death. The book portrays Kafka as sensual and liberated, contrary to his ascetic reputation. Dora lifted his creative obstacles, enabling him to write two major stories, 'The Burrow' and 'Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,' and to move from Prague to Berlin during the hyperinflation winter. Despite tuberculosis, Kafka found happiness, proposed marriage (opposed by Dora's Orthodox Jewish father), and corrected proofs of his last book the day before his death. The novel, using shifting perspectives, achieves truth effects beyond autofiction, aligning with Walter Benjamin's notion of the storyteller as 'a man of good counsel' whose authority derives from death.