Lovers of Franz K by Burhan Sönmez BLOG TOUR t. #SamiHezil @brhnsnmz @OrendaBooks #Translated Fiction #BookReview

 

West Berlin, 1968. As a youth uprising sweeps over Europe in the shadow of the Cold War, two men face each other across an interrogation table. One, Ferdy Kaplan, has shot and killed a student. Kommissar Müller, the other is trying to find out why.
 
As his interrogation progresses, Kaplan’s background is revealed piece by piece, including the love story between him and his childhood friend Amalya, their shared passion for Kafka, and the radical youth movement they joined. When it transpires that Kaplan’s intended target was not the student but Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s close friend and the executor of his literary estate, the interrogation of a murderer slowly transforms into a dialogue between a passionate admirer of Kafka’s work, who is attempting to protect the author’s final wish to have his manuscripts burned, and a police commissioner who is learning more about literature than he ever thought possible from a prisoner in his custody.
 
In this gripping, thought-provoking tribute to Kafka, Burhan Sönmez vividly recreates a key period of history in the 1960s, when the Berlin Wall divided Europe. More than a typical mystery, Lovers of Franz K. is an exploration of the value of books, and the issues of anti-Semitism, immigration, and violence that recur in Kafka’s life and writings.

Lovers of Franz K by Burhan Sönmez was published in hardback on 10 April 2025 by Open Borders Press; an imprint of Orenda Books. It is translated from the Kurdish by Sami Hêzil. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review as part of this blog tour. 

I do like to dip into translated fiction and this is the first novel that was originally written in Kurdish that I've read. 

Whilst this is a slim novel at just 110 pages in the hardback edition, it is a story that will leave a great impression on the reader. I have to admit that I had to do some research into Franz Kafka. I have always been aware of his literary works, but knew very little about his personal life.  I read the novel first, and then went off and did some research, it may be better to do that the other way around as some of the things that I discovered about the real Kafka then made me think a little differently about Sönmez's story. 

The novel is almost all dialogue and takes place in a room in a police station. Ferdy Kaplan is being interrogated by Kommissar Müller. There is no doubt that Kaplan is guilty of shooting and killing a student, he has admitted to the crime. However, it seems that there is much more to this than first appears. Kaplan constantly apologises to the parents of his victim. He seems genuinely sorry for what has happened. 

The reader slowly realises that Kaplan killed the wrong man. He had intended to kill Max Brod, a close friend of Kaplan's hero and idol Franz Kafka. Kaplan thinks that Brod has betrayed Kafka, instead of destroying Kafka's papers after his death, as promised, Brod has made them publicly available. 

It's a short book, but quite a dense story to follow. There were times when I had to go back and re-read some of the dialogue, to make sure that I was on the correct path. 

With flashes of history, and a dip into the passion felt for talented artists this is a clever novel and unlike anything that I've read before.  One to read more than once, and one that awakens curiosity about the characters. 

Burhan Sönmez, now President of PEN International, was born in Turkey in 1965. His mother tongue is Kurdish, which was stigmatised in Turkey during his youth. While practising law and campaigning for human rights in Istanbul, he was seriously injured during a murder attempt by the Turkish police in 1996 and left the country, receiving treatment in Britain and remaining in exile there for several years. He now splits his time between England and Istanbul. Sönmez a Senior Member of Hughes Hall College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Lovers of Franz K. is his sixth novel.

Sami Hêzil was born in Van in Turkish Kurdistan in 1975 and graduated from the Department of English Language and Literature at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University in 1999. His previous translation work consists of English to Kurdish translation, including The Raven and Twenty Other Poems by Edgar Allen Poe and The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.