As the story goes (related years later by a friend of the writer), once when Franz Kafka was walking in a Berlin park, he met a mother whose child, Saskia, was in tears. Learning that the child had lost her doll Christiana, he began bringing her postcards he\u2019d gathered in his travels with notes from the doll about her visits to places such as Paris and Venice. The original missives being lost, Watts follows Larissa Theule\u2014author of Kafka and the Doll (2021), illustrated by Rebecca Green\u2014in crafting imagined ones\u2026and in adding both names and a tidier ending of her own. Here, Franz finds a doll in a secondhand shop and oversees a joyful reunion just before he dies (offstage) from pneumonia: \u201c\u2018No,\u2019 said her mother. \u2018We will not meet Franz again. He has gone to another place.\u2019\u201d (Though Saskia initially notices that Christiana looks different, Franz explains that the doll\u2019s travels have aged her.) The spare but emotional tale will charm readers; they\u2019ll pore over the lavishly detailed scenes of the solitary writer\u2019s apartment, packed with mementos and domestic items, as well as views of small figures strolling wide European streets and of the errant doll posing with landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in the background scenes. The cast is light-skinned throughout.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the story goes (related years later by a friend of the writer), once when Franz Kafka was walking in a Berlin park, he met a mother whose child, Saskia, was in tears. Learning that the child had lost her doll Christiana, he began bringing her postcards he\u2019d gathered in his travels with notes from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}