In his biography of Franz Kafka, Max Brod declared that his friend never wrote a “single word” that was not “infused with a special magic charm.” Ever since the posthumous publication of Kafka’s work, work that only saw the light of day because of Brod’s refusal to carry out Kafka’s request to burn his manuscripts after his death, generations of readers have pored over the writer’s every word, both to be bewitched by those magic charms and to search for meaning in them.