Lovers of Franz K. (125 pages) is Burhan Sönmez’s sixth novel (2024).
This is Sönmez’s first novel he wrote in his mother tongue Kurdish, after writing five novels in Turkish. Kurdish is a language that has been suppressed and despised as a “mountain language” for a hundred years in the region.
Lovers ofFranz K. is a thriller of love and literary revenge in the map of Paris-Istanbul-West Berlin and Tel Aviv, set in the midst of the Cold War in 1968.
While the youth uprising sweeps across Europe, a debate about Franz Kafka appears in student magazines in Paris. There is a secret group that punishes ex-Nazi criminals, and they begin to argue that they should also protect the dead writers and act for their spirit.
Lovers of Franz K. is a story of love and a creative obituary for Kafka.
“Sönmez’s metafictional riff mimics Kafka in the back and forth between agents of the law and the accused. … So it is striking that his first book written in his native Kurdish, a language long suppressed by successive Turkish governments, follows not an overtly political but literary theme. … Sönmez playfully expands Kafka’s world in a literary experiment that encourages readers to reimagine the unfinished work of their heroes.” (Natalie Perman, Financial Times)
“Mr. Sönmez avoids easy judgments, preferring instead to steep his tale in broader quandaries: Is literature a cultural inheritance that we can legitimately claim against the wishes of its creator? … Mr. Sönmez’s prose, gracefully spare in Mr. Hêzil’s translation, evocatively channels Kafka himself, who hovers ghostlike over a trial in which Brod’s betrayal, Kaplan’s obsession and even readers’ own engagement with Kafka become part of the same continuum: a series of transgressions against Kafka’s writings.” (Benjamin Balint, The Wall Street Journal)
“There’s a Kafkaesque quality to the interrogation – ‘It is our job to assume the opposite of what you tell us,’ the police say – but Kurdish author Sönmez is really interested in the question of who owns literature. Was Brod right to publish? Would Kafka be unknown if he hadn’t? The dialogue-led approach makes the book punchy and fast-moving, and brings some surprising twists before the end.” (John Self, The Guardian)
“In this gripping, thought-provoking tribute to Kafka, Burhan Sönmez vividly recreates a key period of history when the Berlin Wall divided Europe, and women were fighting for freedom and against tradition, adopting Jean Seberg’s iconic short haircut from Breathless. More than a typical mystery, Lovers of Franz K. is a brilliant exploration of the value of books, and the issues of anti-Semitism, immigration, and violence that recur in Kafka’s life and writings.” (Barnes & Noble)
“With echoes of Borges and Dostoevsky, Lovers of Franz K is more than a literary psychological thriller – it is a creative resurrection; a metafictional kaleidoscope where Poe meets Kafka whose bureaucracy is refracted through a Cold War lens. Literary rebel Sönmez does not just pay homage to Kafka – he enacts it.” (Georgia de Chamberet, BookBlast)
“Burhan Sonmez’s unashamedly stagey thriller is a homage to Franz Kafka, framed as the trial (of course) of Ferdy Kaplan. … Sonmez, a Kurdish novelist who is president of PEN, which campaigns for freedom of expression, queries how far one should go in the pursuit of what is important to us.” (James Owen, The Times)
“In Ferdy Kaplan, we have a strange and memorable protagonist who has spent his young life immersed in one radical ideology after another, from a childhood in Nazi Germany, to an adolescence in Turkey on the brink of a military coup, to Paris in protest.” (Daniel H. Turtel, Jewish Book Council)
“The story leads us to an intense and mysterious crime novel that gives the readers a taste of Poe, and by expanding the scope of the references into the thin fabric of the story, it keeps the excitement and curiosity alive from the beginning to the end.” (Bawer Rûken, Bianet)
“In Lovers of Franz K. various stories of characters with dual identities, old and new images of the cities of Istanbul, Paris and Berlin, stories of war and political crises and the love of two young people, they all gather around a murder attempt.” (Omer Sonmez, Rudaw)
“Lovers of Franz K is a complete example of a ‘creative attitude’ with its polyphony, multi-layeredness and keeping the thing it problematizes ‘open’ to various interpretations. It is an elegant text dedicated to the beauty of art and the goodness of humans.” (Halûk Sunat, K24kitap)
“Burhan Sönmez’s writing adventure is an event in itself, and the fact that he continues it, constantly renews himself and ‘tests’ himself needs to be examined separately. Those who read one of Burhan Sönmez’s books will be curious about his other books. An author who built his literature in this way is now attempting a new construction.” (Yeni Yaşam Newspaper)
“Burhan Sönmez’s relationship with his readers has gone far beyond an author-reader relationship. A deep bond of love was created between them. In this respect, he developed an enviable writer-reader dialectic. … This is an originality that has been realised without any design or pre-construction as a purpose, and has been encountered only for the first time in the last fifty years, only for Sönmez and his works.” (Murat Bjedug, t24.com.tr)
“His novels are steeped in imprisonment and memory, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and George Louis Borges.” (Jason Farago, The New York Times)
