Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like dreams, Kafka's fables flow naturally out of their private coherence. He was a master at using familiar realistic detail to divine the hidden currents of fear and inconsolability. His influence has been enormous since Max Brod - friend, literary guardian and biographer - had Kafka's novels published posthumously despite the author's dying instructions to burn them...
...Kafka has inspired much fiction and literary criticism. In a recent issue of American Review (No. 17), Philip Roth contributed a compassionate sketch of Kafka that - yes - metamorphosed into an autobiographical fantasy. Roth imagined that Kafka did not die of tuberculosis in 1924 at 41, but emigrated to New Jersey where he became Roth's Hebrew-school teacher and suitor of his maiden aunt...
Roth's feat of scholarship and imagination is an excellent place to begin Letters to Felice, now published for the first time in English, Kafka's confessional correspondence to the nice Jewish secretary from Berlin who from 1912 to 1917 was twice his fiancée but never his bride. Erich Heller's introduction, though heavily written and somewhat abstract, does pinpoint Kafka's "moral hypochondria ... a man ready to feel guiltily responsible for what he knows to be a flaw in the order of the world...
...Kafka never married, though he needed the idea of woman. He spent most of his passion on postage stamps...
Only in the last, painful year of his life did he taste real happiness with Dora Dymant, a 19-year-old Hebrew scholar. As sympathetic companion, nurse, mistress and daughter figure, she telescoped into those fleeting months all that Kafka had sought in a woman...