Vogel prize goes to novel reimagining Kafka’s relationship with friend

Marija Pericic has won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award with her quirky reimaging of Franz Kafka.

‘This is the best day of my life so far’: Marija Pericic has won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her quirky novel about Franz Kafka. Picture: James Croucher

Tim Winton’s first novel was a coming-of-age drama set on the West Australian coast. Kate Grenville’s debut centred on an eccentric homeless woman in Sydney. Marija Pericic, who last night joined them as a winner of The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, has written about an even more remote, even more irregular subject: Franz Kafka.

Pericic, 35, won the $20,000 prize for The Lost Pages, a quirky, funny novel that reimagines the relationship between the Czech-German writer and his friend and literary executor Max Brod.

“This is the best day of my life so far,’’ Pericic said. “I always wanted to enter the Vogel but I never thought I could win it.

“It is literally a dream come true. I now have the confidence to think of myself as a writer.’’

Pericic’s novel prevailed over a first-rate shortlist that includes fiction touching on post-Afghan­istan combat stress, the bush-city separation of family, a friendship with a death-row inmate­ in Asia and a nonfiction account of an under-recorded Australian campaign in World War II.

The other contenders were Jar­rah Dundler for Tryst, Haley Lawrence for Inside the Tiger, David Allan-Petale for Locust Summer and Richard James for Australia’s War With France: The Campaign in Syria and Lebanon, 1941.

Pericic was born in WA. Her mother is German and her father Croatian. She admits she never cared much for Kafka — “I’d read a few of his stories and I wasn’t a huge fan” — though her German fluency was invaluable during a research trip to Europe.

What grabbed her attention was a 2012 legal battle in Israel over thousands of unpublished Kafka papers that had been held by two cat-loving sisters, one of whom was linked to Brod.

“The claim for the papers was a claim for Kafka, a fight over his identity,’’ Pericic said.

“It made me understand that everything we know about Kafka we know from Brod, who not only published his works, but edited and even finished some of them.’’

Kafka died from tuberculosis in 1924, aged 40. Few of his now famous works, such as The Trial, had been published. Brod is ­con­sidered a hero for refusing Kafka’s wish to burn the unpublished pile.

Pericic’s shapeshifting novel tells a different story. Brod has had success with his first book. While delivering a lecture, he is heckled by an unknown young man, who later follows him and foists some stories into his hands.

When he reads them, his reacti­on is: “The stories were ... exception­al. I turned to the title page and stared at the name printed there: Franz Kafka. How that name would come to haunt me.

“All I felt was the sick poison of jealousy, the panic of self-preser­vation and a determination to stop Franz at all costs … I wanted to destro­y Franz’s stories …”

Pericic’s Kafka is not an ailing depressive waiting to turn into a cockroach (as in Metamorphosis) but a handsome, charming, cocky, super-talented young man.

The author admits she now finds Kafka and his work “more intriguing and funnier — I had so much fun writing this book — and I think we all should feel for Brod. Who, first reading Kafka, wouldn’t have the Devil’s voice of jealousy in their ear?”

The Lost Pages is published today by Allen & Unwin.