Word: hayman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ritual murder. And since the Kafkas were doing their best to assimilate, feeling a meaningful religious identity was (until relatively late in his life) almost impossible for Franz. Second, there was his nationality (German), making him an outsider twice removed while in Prague. And then there was his father. Hayman stresses Kafka's relationship with his father as the principal formative influence upon his character, suggesting that it subliminally provided the subject matter for much of his writing. Physically imposing, with a frightening temper that he vented very discriminately on his children and the Czech employees in his fancy-goods...
...Hayman clearly lays out these nightmarish circumstances, and if they somehow seem grotesquely comical, the cumulative effect on Franz was anything but funny. He was crippled for life by an overwhelming conviction of his own vileness, and his biography. Hayman says, is "a series of hesitations in the process of condemning himself and carrying out the execution...
Without his writing, his only lifeline to sanity and order, Kafka's life might have ended in suicide or madness. But Kafka's fiction, as Hayman consistently show, was an outlet for his self-destructive fantasies and aggressive impulses, an ongoing psychotherapy. If he could not solve his inner conflicts in real life nor counteract his growing feeling of isolation, then he could at least face them in literature, and perhaps gain the "illusion of having both under control." Hayman begins the book with a short chapter that underlines Kafka's skill at using his fiction both to confront...
THERE IS LITTLE to find fault with in Hayman's presentation. Sticking closely to Kafka's letters and diaries, which together form a most extensive record of his inner life, and quoting liberally therefrom, he is not obtrusive. His analytical passages seem to have been inserted into the narrative with maximum concern for short. American attention spans; they are humble and mostly insightful, free of excessive jargon-mongering, aware of the crushing bulk of Kafka criticism and content to suggest the clearest connections to the immediate moment of his life. If there are any complaints, they are that...
...Hayman's attitude towards Kafka, it is, not surprisingly, less reverential that Max Brod's; Brod's biography seemed to be written chiefly as an antidote to the view that anyone who created Gregor Samsa must have been a dark and morbid character, though Brod's work is honest and engaging, we almost lose sight of all the self-torture in the radiance of the saint-like glow. Hayman's biography is more balanced, but also admiring (as anyone must be) of Kafka's incredible lack of cynicism, even as he was dying...