Marija Peričić, The Lost Pages (Allen & Unwin 2017)
This book begins with a lie.
The imprint page includes standard disclaimer, ‘Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental,’ but what follows purports to be an account by Max Brod (a real person, you can look him up on Wikipedia) of his relationship with Franz Kafka (ditto). Brod famously disobeyed Kafka’s deathbed instruction to burn all his papers, and so gave the world The Trial and other works that established Kafka’s eminence in 20th century literature. So we’re set up from the beginning for a historical novel about a literary friendship.
Usually, historical novels thrive in the gaps in the historical record: the facts as we have them remain fixed points, and the novelist’s imagination goes to work with people, events and dialogue that have been undocumented. In The Lost Pages, things aren’t so cut and dried. Brod’s biography of Kafka is one of the main historical sources about him. This novel is presented as a manuscript found in Kafka’s papers as preserved by Brod and now owned by two Israeli sisters (which really do exist, unexamined by scholars): so what the fictional Brod writes here can claim to override the historical Brod’s version.
And it does.
It’s a tale full of obsession, anguish, betrayal, jealousy, paranoia (well, it is a story about Kafka), hallucinatory episodes (ditto), and enormous improbabilities which are resolved by even less likely revelations. I kept forgetting that it was written by a 30-something woman living in Melbourne – I was away in the world of Prague literary celebrity a century ago, having a great time. It would be wrong to say the book is silly, but I find it hard to think of a better word for its quality that most charmed me. It’s a romp, if a romp can include social exclusion (Brod in real life and in the novel had severe spinal curvature), abject humiliation, extreme mental anguish …
The Lost Pages is the fifteenth book I’ve read for the 2018 Australian Women Writers Challenge.
Me fail? I fly! 
I liked it!
(See https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/25/the-lost-pages-by-marija-pericic-2017-vogel-winner-bookreview/)
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Thanks for linking to this, Lisa. I have to make it a rule not to read your review of a book until after I’ve written my own, otherwise I wouldn’t write anything. I love your review of this. In particular, it’s good to be reminded of that marvellous moment some way into the novel where the state of Max’s body is revealed after his attractiveness has been established.
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