In chapter two, Zilcosky argues that Kafka’s The Man Who Disappeared (Der Verschollene) not only offers a counterpoint to Bildungsromane, which Kafka scholarship has noted, but also exotic literature, which also relies on a narrative of personal development. Unlike the narratives in which the main character “finds himself,” Karl Rossmann becomes increasingly lost in Amerika (42). As Zilcosky puts it, “Der Verschollene recounts the disappearance – or, as I will argue, the loss – of the traveling ‘I’” (42). Hence also Zilcosky’s insistence on using the title Kafka  intended for the novel,  Der  Verschollene, rather  than  Brod’s  Amerika, which  it  is published under. Carefully reading the narrative’s structure of lost and found together with travel writings by Goethe (Italienische Reise) and Flaubert (Voyage en Orient) that Kafka read around the time that he began writing Der Verschollene, which Zilcosky refers to as “Kafka’s 1911-1914 travel novel,” Zilcosky demonstrates how Kafka offers a different kind of travelogue. For example, Kafka’s novel does not offer what Mary Louise Pratt has termed the “monarch of all I survey view,” that is, the view from above, featured in Goethe and Flaubert’s travelogues. As Zilcosky tells us, “this view – recurring in travel texts from Goethe to Flaubert to Hesse – […] allows him [the traveler] to delineate the exotic lands’ borders, and […] to bolster the singularity of his perspective” (27). As Zilcosky argues, when Rossmann cannot see out of the ship bringing him to “America” or again, when he cannot see very far out of the window at his uncle’s residence in New York City, Kafka challenges the perspectival vantage-point of travel writing and of travelers in fin de siècle Europe.

Subsequently, in chapter three, focusing on The Trial, Zilcosky examines more closely the foreign or the alienation that is located close to him, which had been foreshadowed by the early co-authored travel narrative Richard and Samuel. Reading The Trial as a travel novel because K. is constantly in motion, Zilcosky argues that it is at once a historical-political allegory and a meditation on constant linguistic slippage. For example, he discusses how Kafka’s use of language engages the crisis of language expressed by his contemporaries, such as Fritz Mauthner and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal. Zilcosky, here, and throughout his study, focuses particular and sometimes new attention on details: for example, the meaning of words that have multiple and important meanings for the story in which they appear, such as “Verfahren” (legal proceedings), “sich ver-fahren,” (taking wrong turns).

Zilcosky reads travel narratives and travel culture together with Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and The Castle in chapters four and five respectively. Zilcosky challenges Kafka scholarship  that  would  read  “In  the  Penal  Colony”  as  either  a  post-colonial  critique  of colonization or a narrative about sadism, arguing instead that the story’s geographic context and sadism need to be read together. In Zilcosky’s estimation, “the problem with such postcolonial readings is that they fail to address the promise of sado-masochistic pleasure that is so central to the story’s effect. Just as the earlier psychoanalytical interpretations repressed politics, these political readings repress desire” (105). Here, as at other moments of his well-researched volume, Zilcosky points out something that scholarship may have noticed in passing but not focused on enough: Peter F. Neumeyer’s investigation – “ignored” as Zilcosky puts it “by thirty years of subsequent scholarship” – lays out Kafka’s passion for this series, particularly one volume, The Sugar Baron (1914), of which Kafka says “I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules [Vorschift] for my life” (106). While scholarship has acknowledged that Octave Mirabeau’s Torture  Garden  (1899)  influences  “In  the  Penal  Colony,”  the  importance  of  the  popular adventure series Schaffstein’s Little Green Books has been overlooked. (Throughout Zilcosky’s study he delineates the influence of this series on Kafka and his writings.)

In chapter five, Zilcosky turns to the correlations between Schaffstein’s Little Green Books and Kafka’s The Castle. Zilcosky focuses on the profession of the protagonist, K., who, in this novel, is a surveyor. K. is a “Vermesser,” he measures, but this word, Zilcosky reminds us, is also closely related to the verb “sich vermessen,” that is, making a mistake while measuring (124). Zilcosky does not merely read the surveyor figuratively; he also looks for the literal source for the figure, drawing the reader’s attention to newer evidence that reveals the source can be found in Schafftsein’s volumes. Additionally, he draws on the geo-political significance of land surveying, bringing in previous studies undertaken by Wilhelm Emrich. But The Castle’s main character does not attain any of the positions typical of surveyors represented either in fictitious or historical accounts. Returning to Pratt’s discussion of the “monarch of all I survey” view, Zilcosky presents numerous Schaffstein volumes, in which the heroes gradually attain visual, psychological, and economic ground. By contrast, K. is “a caricature of this surveyor […] K. slithers in the village mud” (138). Since K. never attains higher ground, he cannot carry out his task as surveyor, to view and map the area. Additionally, unlike the heroes of Schaffstein’s travel narratives, who assert themselves as subjects by subjugating the area that they oversee to their reading of it, K. remains mired “in the field he attempts to survey […] he is both subject and object at once” (138). In a very subtle reading of the novel’s stylistics, Zilcosky underscores how Kafka’s writing lacked descriptive content particularly when contrasted to Schaffstein’s modifier heavy narratives. Kafka’s linguistic sparseness creates what Zilcosky calls a “negative topos,” stylistically inviting the reader to mimic the gaze and ascriptive tendencies of colonial travelers. In this way, “Kafka shifts the political question of colonialism onto the act of reading” (150).

In chapter six, Zilcosky’s discusses Kafka’s Letter to Milena. Zilcosky reads the correspondence, which consistently discussed and deferred travel, together with fin de siècle technological developments that allowed new forms of communication, such as telegrams and telephones, and of travel, such as the increased network of railroads.

The closing chapter discusses how Kafka’s late story “The Hunter Gracchus” engages travel and death, focusing particular attention on Gracchus’ irritation about an image on his wall of a “bushman, who is aiming his spear at me” (179). Zilcosky tells us, “this is Gracchus’ only punishment, but it is a significant one: his sole visual stimulation reminds him every day of the preposterousness of his primitivist fantasy. He is caught in a hopeless cliché” (182). Zilcosky argues that Gracchus tells the story of Kafka, who at once cannot let go of a fantasy of living high above fields of sugar cane but who is also critical of this desire. Zilcosky argues that Kafka’s examinations of this fantasy remain “dialectical throughout” (184). “This continually dialectical desire  for  and  against  exotic  nostalgia  defines  much  as  of  what  we  still  understand  as Kafkaesque” (184), Zilcosky argues, continuing on, “He cannot discard ‘home’ just as he cannot discard homelessness” (184).

In addition to bringing to our attention previously lesser known writings of Kafka’s, such as Richard and Samuel and writings that Kafka read, such as Schaffstein’s Little Green Books; providing the reader with nuanced readings of Kafka’s writings; and weaving in vital background about the historical and political context, the volume also includes photographs of Kafka on trips, maps from Baedeker’s, notes from his correspondence with Milena and reproductions of pages from Schaffstein’s adventure travel novels. Drawing on previous Kafka scholarship, well-known and overlooked, Zilcosky provides a new angle on Kafka by reading his writing with a focus on their relationship to fin de siècle imperialism, colonization, exoticism, and travel writing. An invaluable contribution to Kafka scholarship and postcolonial studies, Zilcosky’s study is an engaging read.