Lawyer, clerk, hypochondriac, comedian: a new biography allows Tim Martin to see a great writer’s many selves.
'Everything can be hazarded':
Franz Kafka Photo: Wesley
Merritt
"Dear Sir,” the reader wrote, “You have made me unhappy. I bought your
Metamorphosis as a present for my cousin, but she doesn’t know what to make of
the story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who doesn’t know what to make of it
either. Her mother gave the book to my other
cousin, and she doesn’t know what to make of it either. Now they’ve written to
me…”
History doesn’t record Franz Kafka’s reply
to this fan letter from 1917, but his correspondent’s fascinated bemusement
echoes down a hundred years of Kafkaology. What, after all, are any of us to
make of this body of work, with its elusive blend of the mundane, the comic and
the purely uncanny? Generations of readers and scholars have observed it through
the telescopes of mysticism, Judaism, modernism, psychoanalysis, theory and
biography, but the work continues to float like a strange planet in the skies of
literature, enclosed by its unique atmosphere of wide-awake nightmare and
hilarious, lazy unease.
The German scholar Reiner Stach has spent more than 20 years working on Kafka’s life, and his comprehensive biography is now available in this country for the first time since the publication in German of its two volumes in 2002 and 2008. It arrives in a Kafkan bureaucratic tangle all its own, since these two stout books are, in fact, the final two in a projected trilogy. To write the first volume, covering the childhood, Stach needs access to papers from the estate of Kafka’s friend and executor Max Brod, which have been locked up for years in the possession of their elderly custodian (Brod’s secretary’s daughter) while a protracted court case shuttled between judges.
The German scholar Reiner Stach has spent more than 20 years working on Kafka’s life, and his comprehensive biography is now available in this country for the first time since the publication in German of its two volumes in 2002 and 2008. It arrives in a Kafkan bureaucratic tangle all its own, since these two stout books are, in fact, the final two in a projected trilogy. To write the first volume, covering the childhood, Stach needs access to papers from the estate of Kafka’s friend and executor Max Brod, which have been locked up for years in the possession of their elderly custodian (Brod’s secretary’s daughter) while a protracted court case shuttled between judges.
The irony of a Kafka biographer stymied by the depredations of heredity and
the slow revolutions of the law will be lost on no one, though a fortunate judgment last
year finally ordered the papers back into public hands. As it
stands, however, Stach’s biography introduces us to Kafka in 1910 – he is a
27-year-old insurance clerk living with his mother, father and three sisters in
their flat in Prague – and follows him through to his death at the age of 40
from complications of tuberculosis.
More at The Telegraph
More at The Telegraph
