Word: hayman
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...Kafka: A Biography, Ronald Hayman carefully traces the close connection between the circumstances of Kafka's life and his work, bringing his sometimes puzzling and abstract fiction comfortably down to the human realm. The book is also valuable as a slap-in-the face for anyone who has flirted with the idea of a life of self-punishment; for, although Hayman wants to "emphasize what is positive in Kafka's negativism," he cannot help leaving us with the rather tragic picture of a tortured artist who served self-torture more dutifully than...
Which is not to condemn Kafka in the least, for his suffering was truly awful: Hayman believes that it was quite an achievement for the writer to have salvages as much as he did from his despair. Even Edmund Wilson, in an essay that otherwise sternly downplays the importance of his work, concedes that "the cards were stacked against poor Kafka in an overpowering...
...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...
...admires especially for what she calls their "simple, classical lines." She has a penchant for red, but almost all her clothes are colorful. In Adolfo's view, she projects "a chic, affluent way of looking, extremely sophisticated." Blass calls her style "crisp and fresh." According to Gale Hayman, co-owner of Giorgio's, a shop on Rodeo Drive where Mrs. Reagan has bought some of her clothes, she will be "very proper, very dignified, like Pat Nixon. But she will go a few steps further, closer to Jackie Onassis." Top U.S. designers, anticipating a boost in business, note...