Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Singer" (trans. Willa and Edwin Muir) (Czech Republic)

It’s December 12. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Franz Kafka’s story, “Josephine the Singer”:

The main protagonist of Kafka’s writings is Everyman as artist or the artist as Everyman. Whether it is the inexplicably guilty Josef K in The Trial, or the wanderer who will never reach the Castle, or the emigrant in awe of the Great Theatre of Oklahoma in Amerika, or even the monstrous vermin into which Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed in Metamorphosis, they are all images of the writer in search of meaning through the unreliable instrument of language, under the eyes of a demanding and seemingly unreasonable God. For Kafka, the task of the writer is only possible when it can’t be accomplished. “If the Tower of Babel could have been built without ascending it, it would have been allowed,” reads one of his aphorisms. Josephine, singer among the mysterious Mouse Folk, achieves her purpose because her art affects the community in a way that no one understands.

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