Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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LETTERS TO FRIENDS, FAMILY AND EDITORS by Franz Kafka; translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Schocken; 509 pages...
...Auden once wrote: "Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of." Kafka has achieved a peculiar sort of extended immortality, alive not only in his books but also as an idea, an item of vocabulary employed by people who never read a phrase he wrote. It is an odd fate for the haunted functionary of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague: his magnificent hallucinations have collapsed in the public mind...
...unpublished masterpieces (The Castle, The Trial, Amerika) that posthumously raised his estate from weird minor talent working in the ruins of Austria-Hungary to premonitory genius of the century's blackest impulses. Brod of course refused; it remained for both the Nazis and the Soviets to suppress Kafka's works-a neat case of reality confirming the artist's point...
...Kafka was fairly prolific in his 41 years; besides his major novels and some 30 stories, he left two volumes of revealing, intensely personal diaries. His Letters to Milena and Letters to Felice, two women he loved, have already been printed, as well as the 1919 Letter to His Father. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors brings together his remaining correspondence. It is, presumably, the last to be heard from Kafka...
...with paperback Freud insights and melodramatic compositions so calculating that he sometimes makes Norman Rockwell appear primitive. Yet in the midst of a darkened landscape, Magritte can mysteriously illuminate the sky: on an ominous day he makes it rain identical men in bowler hats, as impassive and relentless as Kafka's bureaucrats. In such works the conjurer celebrates and mourns the human condition and shows why, despite his shortcomings and the shiftings of fashion, he remains a perennial favorite of connoisseurs as well as crowds...