Kafka’s Curse opens by portraying its protagonist, a Muslim man of mixed descent (“Javanese and Dutch and Indian and God knows what else”) as the victim of a degenerative, form-altering disease, the “Kafka’s Curse” of the title. Containing quite literally “the roots of another being...something struggling to be born,”he slowly reverts to a vegetal state and eventually becomes a tree. This living death is the final metamorphosis of an individual who was born Omar Khan but spent his life passing as Oscar Kahn, a white Jew married to the daughter of one of the finest English families of Natal. Omar/Oscar’s grandmother was born Christian Katryn into a poor Afrikaner (Dutch-descended) family but became Muslim Kulsum when she married. Omar's white wife Anna, the victim of childhood incest perpetrated by her brother (who now preys on his own daughters), discovers yet another skewing of her family tree: her father's secret relationship and child with a colored woman. Omar/Oscar’s nephew Fadiel runs away to live with Marianne, a woman raised on a small farm in the Orange Free State, the heart of Afrikaner nationalism, who has since become a bohemian, a doctoral candidate and, in her family’s eyes, a miscegenator. Omar/ Oscar’s brother Malik, a devout Muslim patriarch, falls in love with Amina, a woman raised as a Muslim but now married to a white, ANC-affiliated Jew. In the novella's surreal conclusion it appears that Amina, or some hybrid incarnation of her, may have murdered many of the men in her life, including Malik, just as Anna may have murdered her predatory brother. Nothing is certain plotwise. Formally, however, everything is certainly mixed.

If Coetzee's Foe is, in Benita Parry's trenchant observation, "little touched by the autochthonous, transplanted and recombinant cultures of South Africa's African, Asian, and Coloured populations," Kafka's Curse is everywhere touched by them.28 Its characters compose a nation made from transnational movements: the Dutch settlers, English colonials, and Jewish refugees who came in successive waves to the southern tip of Africa, and the Cape Malays and Indians who were brought by the global systems of Dutch slavery and British indentured labor. The narration of individual chapters from the perspectives of different characters, each multiply inscribed by the codes of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class, effects a polyphonic form that refuses singular, homogenizing, or omniscient perspectives. The narrative’s heteroglossia further extends to its incorporation of several of South Africa's fourteen official languages, including English, Afrikaans (in both its white and colored versions), Hindi, and Arabic. In a signal example Marianne, the Afrikaner free spirit, speaks to Terry, formerly Tertius, like herself a refugee from Afrikaner culture. Terry peppers his English comments with Afrikaans expressions, driving Marianne to exclaim: "this afrikaans thing of yours, you know, every sentence juiced up with your favourite pampoenspreekwoordjies [country proverbs], it's becoming too much. I'm really dik [fed up] of it." Marianne, fully aware of the irony in her recourse to an Afrikaans word to express her frustration with Terry's hybridized or metamorphosized idiom, goes on to imagine the reasons for Terry's linguistic switching. Perhaps, she muses, he was

[t]aught this language with a precision that hurts, no verb out of line, no inappropriate adjectives, no plurals used to multiply single meanings, and an absolute must—never, never, get your genders mixed up. Anyone who used a “hy” for a “hom” or confused “syne” and “haarne” was given the cold-eyed third degree: it shrivelled you up inside

and made you doubt your ancestry. Ja-nee, somewhere in this creature lurks a twisted Hotnot-tongue gene. So, like a child remembering those hateful piano lessons—this key for that scale, but the tone is all wrong, supple fingers wasted in their rigid passage over inert black and white keys—Terry delights in creating discord and clash in his language, a low-toned Capie English lit up by flashes of Afrikaans donder-en-bliksem [thunder and lightning]. (183–84)

This meditation on the undoing of a home language—performed in a novel written in English by an Indian from a Gujarati-speaking family—poignantly expresses the pain and possibility of transition and translation. Miniaturizing the method of Dangor’s text, Marianne’s description of the breaking of syntactical law mirrors the novella’s formal breaking of apartheid's emblematically "black and white" law; a law that sought to keep ethnicities apart, languages separate, and communities firmly racialized.

If we take Benedict Anderson at his word, and accept an intimate bond between the imaginative constructs of novels and nations, then the interweaving of black, white, Indian, and colored characters and voices in Kafka's Curse teaches us, through the preoccupations of its novelistic form, to reenvision the South African nation itself.29 Mixing up and bleeding together those same categories of identity whose minute differentiation in racial classifications and Immorality Acts constituted the very underpinnings of the apartheid state, Kafka's Curse portrays metamorphosis as both curse and blessing, both the cultural wages of a history scarred by the unspeakably violent politics of purity and the future promise of a diverse and democratic nation. Such a vision flirts with utopianism, particularly when contrasted to the decade following the ANC's 1994 electoral victory, a period marked on the one hand by official state discourse's celebration of the nonracialist “rainbow nation,” and on the other, by the paradoxical recrudescence of differentialist ethnocultural identification. The challenge facing both Kafka's Curse and the nation it represents is that of finding a middle ground between apartheid's confining binaries of black vs. white, volkstaat vs. the world, and some postmodernist democratic idyll where the plenitude of endlessly mobile and mutating difference recuperates the schisms of a brutally divided history.