Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" The speaker, a blimpish Hollywood Britisher in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, sucked petulantly on his whisky & soda and stared at his outdated copy of Horizon, Cyril Connolly's British monthly for intellectuals. If he had lived long enough to investigate the matter, he might have wondered how Scottie Wilson, a half-educated furniture dealer turned artist, had ever made his list of the big guns in the 20th Century highbrow arsenal in the first place...
Bond of Blood. The second and last volume of The Diaries (the first appeared last year) reveals the crescendo of this torment, as it filled tuberculous Franz Kafka's own final years, up to his death in 1924, at 40. His father, a stolid and self-possessed businessman who was a living reproach to the introspective writer, was always at the center of his thoughts. He loved his father and admired him; he also feared and hated him. The "bond of blood too is the target of my hatred; the sight of the double bed at home, the used...
...years the diaries were kept, Kafka became engaged to a generous and efficient young businesswoman. For five years the affair dragged on, but Kafka finally broke off because the girl could never understand his way of living and because he feared that as a sick and. indigent writer he would be a burden to her. In his diary he yearns for marriage and normal happiness; the thought of children makes him ecstatic. Once an apartment was rented and furniture bought, but his self-doubts forced him to turn back. In one entry he sadly and ironically remarks that his fiancee...
Gentle Hands. In his last year Kafka knew a moment of happiness. He met a young Polish Jewish girl at a seaside camp, and teased her as she scaled fish: "Such gentle hands and such bloody work." For a few harried months she lived with him, making him once again want to live and write. He even asked her Orthodox father for permission to marry her, explaining that he was not a religious Jew but "a repentant one, seeking conversion." But it was too late; his lungs were withering...
What redeems these diaries from sheer morbidness is Kafka's herculean determination to find health and purpose in his writing. Even when he thought of suicide, he drove himself to his desk. Writing "is my struggle for self-preservation ... Go on working regardless of everything." He went on working...