It's always tricky when an author's name becomes an adjective. Orwellian, Machiavellian, Faulknerian -- these designations make it hard to see a writer on his or her own terms. This is perhaps most true of Franz Kafka, whose sobriquet, Kafkaesque, has become a catchall for the weird and inexplicable.

Yet 84 years after his death by tuberculosis at age 40, Kafka continues to defy such simplifications and to force us to consider him anew. That's the effect of Mark Harman's new translation of his first novel, "Amerika," restored to its original title, "The Missing Person."

"Amerika" has long held an anomalous place among Kafka's writings; it's a comic anti-picaresque in which a young European named Karl Rossmann immigrates to the United States and undergoes a series of adventures, not so much finding as losing his way in the world. In this new version, Harman offers an unfiltered take on the novel, which was left unfinished when Kafka abandoned work on it in 1914.

This is important because, like much of Kafka's writing, "Amerika" was cleaned up for its posthumous 1927 publication by Max Brod, the author's literary executor. It says a lot -- as much, perhaps, as his notorious reluctance to publish his work -- that none of Kafka's three novels (this one, "The Castle" and "The Trial") was finished. It speaks to his ambivalence, his own sense of incompletion.

These issues mark his fiction, but we've been encouraged to read that work as emblematic of an amorphous, modern alienation rather than a personal world view.

Here we have the "Kafkaesque" problem again. As an example, Harman cites the opening passage of "The Missing Person," in which Karl arrives in New York and sees the Statue of Liberty. "The arm with the sword now reached aloft," Kafka writes, "and about her figure blew the free winds."

Over the years, that image has been framed as an error (Kafka never visited America) or a clue that "The Missing Person" is "a dream narrative." Harman, though, convincingly argues that Kafka didn't have any such thing in mind.

"Just as it is impossible," he points out, "to dismiss as a nightmare the perception of Gregor Samsa in 'Metamorphosis' that his body has been mysteriously transformed overnight into that of a bug (the text states quite unambiguously that 'it was no dream'), we cannot simply explain away this surreal Statue of Liberty as a subjective perception of Karl Rossmann."

So what was Kafka doing? What all novelists do, creating a fictional landscape that reflects their most deeply felt perceptions. This is the triumph of "The Missing Person," that it echoes Kafka's sense of menace -- or worse, of being misunderstood.