Kafka’s Dick by Alan Bennett

Yorkshire insurance salesman Sydney likes to think of himself as an intellectual. He knows that WH Auden never wore underpants, but he doesn’t bother himself with the poetry.

His hero is Franz Kafka, perhaps because Kafka was also an insurance salesman. But he’s far more interested in Franz’s gloomy relationship with his overbearing father, Hermann, than he is in the novels.

Sydney and his much-belittled wife, Linda, are about to get a first-hand lesson in literary criticism and the surreal with the arrival, in their 1980s suburban living room, of the long-dead Kafka and his friend Max Brod, hotly pursued by Hermann. On his deathbed Kafka got Brod, then the famous one of the pair, to agree to destroy all his stories, novels and letters. Brod reneged on the promise and published.

Will he be damned when Kafka finds out? Or will Kafka be grateful that Brod has ensured his reputation as one of the 20th century’s greatest writers?

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Booking opens – Members: 4 September; Non-members: 11 September

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