At first glance, Prague's Franz Kafka Memorial looks like an optical illusion gone wrong. A small, dapper Kafka rides atop a headless, hollow suit that strides forward as if it hasn't yet noticed anything is missing.

Sculptor Jaroslav Róna borrowed the image from Kafka's early story 'Description of a Struggle,' in which the narrator leaps onto a friend's shoulders and rides him through the night streets like a horse. Unveiled in 2004, eighty years after Kafka's death, it was the first monument to him in his own city, partly because the communist regime had spent decades pretending he didn't exist. Visitors rub the bronze shoes for luck, which is why they gleam.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use the memorial to unpack its surreal source material, tracing Kafka's footsteps to the school he feared, the cafes where he met Einstein and Brod, and the apartments where his strange, claustrophobic imagination took shape.