A Top Hat with Tales

In the essay “Kafka and His Precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges shows how reading an author’s work can reveal qualities that are concealed in the writing of previous authors. He argues that influence is determined by the order in which readers read texts, rather than the order in which they were written—a view he demonstrates by pointing out ideas in Zeno of Elea, Han Yu, Søren Kierkegaard and Robert Browning that would not exist for readers who had not previously read Franz Kafka. Borges’s novel approach places the onus on readers to attribute meaning to texts based on their own reading history.

Patrice Martin’s Kafka’s Hat is a skillful demonstration of Borges’s claim, drawing his reader’s attention to shared stylistic and thematic aspects latent in the texts of four preceding writers: Borges, Paul Auster, Italo Calvino and Kafka. Martin brings together some of...