Word: kafka
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...generations later, all of these opinions can still find adherents. Kafka's work is so specific on the surface, and so cryptic underneath, that it can serve any interpreter. His admirers and detractors "agree on only one point: Kafka "was the neurotic artist personified. He despised his work as an insurance clerk but would not quit. He shied from sentiment as a "fatness of feeling" and recoiled from sex: "Coitus is the punishment for the happiness of being together." He could write only about what he knew, and what he knew were his dreams. "My talent for portraying...
...Kafka's fiction the only history is case history: his own. Whether he is called Samsa, Raban or Joseph K., every protagonist is Franz. The oppressive boss, commandant or schoolmaster are all refractions of Hermann Kafka, the father Franz feared: "You acquired in my eyes that enigmatic quality common to all tyrants, whose authority rests not on what they think but on who they are." The accident files that Kafka used by day become A Report to an Academy: "You have done me the honor of inviting me to give an account of the life I formerly...
...Kafka described himself accurately enough as "weakly and slight," but he had the strength to endure and prevail. He did so by vanishing into his writing. "I don't have 'literary interests,' " he wrote Felice, "literature is what I'm made of." Human relations, love, even health were of no concern; all that came to matter was language, "man's greatest invention...
Every tale, whether it was a novella or a paragraph, was given what Thomas Mann called a "conscientious, curiously explicit, objective, clear and correct style." Kafka's pathological concern for style was so extreme that only a few tales were published in his lifetime. But the meticulousness that made him a dangling, indecisive figure in life produced modern myths in a prose like shards of glass. It was meant to be lucid, and it was intended to cut. It has drawn blood for 50 years...
...when the author is praised today, it is less as a spellbinder than as a seer. Bertolt Brecht is typical of those who believe that "Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state apparat." But Kafka was no East European Orwell staring into the cracked crystal ball. He was wholly apolitical and without any real presentiments of the Holocaust, which was to consume all three of his sisters. He knew of anti-Semitism when it was virulent but not lethal; he experienced bureaucracy before the days...