Excavating Kafka by James Hawes
In Excavating Kafka, the satirist James Hawes sets out to debunk the myths surrounding Franz Kafka. Writing in a style that swings between mock-epic (chapter titles begin “In which our hero...”) and the stern tone of an admonishing schoolteacher, Hawes works through the latter stages of his subject's life proving that he wasn't the “tortured, quasi-saintly genius” that lecturers and tour guides say he was. To make his case, he invokes spades of historical context and, the book's much-trumpeted revelation, describes for the first time Kafka's hidden porn stash. Kafka, he shows us, was not an austere, oversensitive hypochondriac who feared publication, but a normal guy who was proud of being a successful author and, in his spare time, ogled bizarre exotic pornography. Although he sets out his argument convincingly enough, the problem is that his point - that Kafka “behaved simply in the way that men like him behaved” - isn't as interesting as he seems to think. The best part of this book is the final chapter when Hawes drops the myth-busting and does some theorising of his own.

Ararat: In Search of the Mythical Mountain by Frank Westerman
Ararat is both an account of a spiritual journey and a philosophical inquiry into the relationship between belief and knowledge. The much-praised Dutch writer, Frank Westerman, makes a pilgrimage to the sacred mountain in an attempt to re-examine the religious beliefs he held in his youth that have since been worn away into a nebulous agnosticism. He gets to grips with the biblical myths surrounding the mountain, as well as their current political significance, and ultimately sets off to climb it. What separates Ararat from the hundreds of other books that have taken on this subject in the past few years is the poetic, novelistic logic behind the author's search. He anchors his thoughts, not to the main turning points of the 20th century, but to the traumatic events from his childhood. He quotes and interviews, not the great scientific and theological thinkers of the day, but the secondary-school teachers who had such a great impact on his outlook on life. It is Westerman's calm intelligence and freshness of perspective that make his book so appealing.

Excavating Kafka by James Hawes
Quercus £14.99 pp199
Ararat by Frank Westerman, translated by Sam Garrett
Harvill Secker £16.99 pp231

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