It was Kafka who started it.  This obsession with identity.  He must have noticed the ground shifting under his feet, the picture he had of himself and his family and his place of birth moving increasingly out of register. As though people around him had been made uncertain and suddenly had to become preoccupied by where they were from in order to prove their existence.  They suddenly had to say what state they belonged to and what religion they had.  Up to then, when they were asked where they were from they just didn’t understand the question.  ‘I come from here,’ they said, because they had never been far away or left home very much.  But then they had to find more defensive answers. Why else would Kafka have started a novel with the words:  ‘Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K…’  Not lies so much as falsehoods, slander, misrepresentations.  Better still in the original:  ‘Jemand muss Joseph K. verleumdet haben…’

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Hugo Hamilton is a writer. He is the author of books including The Last Shot and The Speckled People. His most recent novel is Disguise.