Word: kafka
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...majority of letters are written from sanitariums that Kafka inhabited with restless, despairing frequency during his last years. The eerie, lucent prose quickens into something like paranoia. Kafka fights for sleep: "Enemies everywhere ... Two hundred Prague schoolchildren have been quartered here. A hellish noise, a scourge of humanity." Not quite whining, he painfully records the rise and fall of his temperature, the coughs, the catarrhs, the betrayals in his body, the bats in his soul. "The phantoms of the night," he says, "have tracked me down." Earlier: "The physical illness is only an overflow of the spiritual illness." Kafka...
Still, there are moments when the writer practically dithers with good-hearted advice to lovelorn friends. At such times, he seems rather sweetly engaged in life's daily emotional traffic, even though Kafka was aware that he could never experience what Thomas Hardy called "the wonder and the wormwood of the whole...
...Kafka's spirit was as precise as hallucination, but triply or quadruply removed, adrift, isolated: a German-speaking Jew living in Prague in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emotionally overpowered by his father. Interesting, if futile, critical combats have been waged over the question of whether Kaf ka was merely a talented neurotic or a visionary genius. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1950: "Kafka is being wildly overdone . . . The trouble with Kafka was that he could never let go of the world-of his family, of his job, of his yearning for bourgeois happiness-in the interest...
Thirteen years later, the critic George Steiner countered: "Kafka's nightmare-vision may well have derived from private hurt and neurosis. But that does not diminish its uncanny relevance." As Steiner elaborated, Kafka "was, in a literal sense, a prophet . . . He saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering. The Trial exhibits the classic model of the terror state. It prefigures the furtive sadism, the hysteria which totalitarianism insinuates into private and sexual life, the faceless boredom of the killers. Since Kafka wrote, the night knock has come on innumerable doors...
Technology-nuclear weapons, microcomputers, killer satellites-may have rendered some of Kafka's nightmares obsolete. And we have lived so long with the absurd, retailed for so many years by so many depressing Frenchmen, that it bores us. But Franz Kafka's works still serve the primary function he described in a 1904 letter to his friend Oskar Pollak: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside...