Two books in one: you turn it over and it becomes the other. A winter in Zürau is about Franz Kafka’s stay in a small Bohemian village with his sister Ottla after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Or, as Gabriel Josipovici puts it in the foreword: “One day in the summer of 1917, the writer Franz Kafka woke up and found his mouth full of blood.” (The echo of the opening line of metamorphosis (This is certainly intentional.) Here, in isolation, he recovered, or at least tried to. He wrote to Max Brod: “I do not write. Moreover, my will is not directed towards writing. If I could save myself … by digging holes, I would dig holes.”

Josipovici quotes this and adds that in the second volume of his Collected letters. Josipovici likes to mention Beckett from time to time, which I like. But Kafka, as so often in his letters, did not tell us the whole story. Of course he wrote in Zürau – he was Kafka, for heaven’s sake – and he produced what Brod eventually collected under the title The Zürau Aphorismsor, less bitingly, Reflections on sin, hope, suffering and the true way.

The 181 pages of Josipovici’s monograph, if you can call it that, are difficult to summarize, but they are a mixture of biography, literary criticism and psychological insight, and are among the best I have read on Kafka. As his earlier volumes of literary criticism and essays attest, Josipovici is surprisingly readable; his prose simply takes you by the hand. At one point he quotes Kafka complaining about mice, but also about the cat who is supposed to look after them and who keeps soiling his room (“How hard it is to come to an understanding with an animal on this matter.”) As Josipovici says, “It is a transition from paranoia to PG Wodehouse to paranoia and back to Wodehouse in a few sentences and with remarkable ease.” Josipovici likes to mention Wodehouse from time to time, and I like that too.

Now turn the book over, like a record. (Josipovici used a similar two-in-one trick with Mobius the Stripper in 1972). A winter in ZürauThe blurb on the inside begins: “Fiction and non-fiction are two sides of the same coin. Or are they not? Kafka is on the run.” partitaThe blurb begins with the same two sentences and then continues: “Michael Penderecki is on the run.” Other than that, there is little that connects the two books, and I’ve already spent too much time trying to make a connection. No matter: this is fiction, and Josipovici has his own way of writing it, and it is, like his nonfiction, astonishingly readable considering he considers himself a modernist in the great tradition. He once said of his fiction: “Suddenly it occurred to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the forms of description I was using; I didn’t like any form of description. Moreover, I suddenly realized that I didn’t need them.”

So we have a novella told largely in dialogue, but so cleverly that you never have trouble figuring out who is speaking. It begins with a man named Karim paying a visit to Penderecki, who has been sleeping with his wife. He shows him a switchblade and tells Penderecki that if he is still there the next day, he will kill him. Penderecki takes the hint and sets off on a journey that takes him from London to Paris, to Nice, to Domaso, to Sils Maria, to Zurich and back to London. (I may have missed one or two places, it flies by.)

At the beginning he flees for his life with only a suitcase; but in Nice he meets Charlie, a nightclub singer with whom he has a heartbreaking affair. She reminds us of the kind of heroine you would find in New Wave Movies – flighty, enigmatic, immensely desirable and annoying as hell. (She makes him cycle from Nice to Monaco, for heaven’s sake.) In fact, the whole novella could just as well be the screenplay for a New Wave Film, and I say that in a completely laudatory sense. In a review of Josipovici’s 2010 novel Just kiddingI wrote: “Whether this is a serious work of art or simply a Game of the mind is something I haven’t formed an opinion on after a week.’ I could say the same thing here. But in the end, who cares? It’s great fun and very entertaining.