Franz Kafka: A Biography

Rating:
Summary: Left behind he tells the story of a wounded soul
Review: Max Brod was Kafka's best friend. Kafka willed his writing to the flames and Brod rescued them, and helped make them known to the world.
Brod was a writer of considerable accomplishment and output yet to his great credit he recognized that it was Kafka who was the great genius who mankind would come to reread and reread.
The biography tells the story of Kafka's difficult quest to live and write. It contains much of what Kafka reportedly said and is thus rich in his own unique voice.
It is not the most comprehensive nor the authoritative biography but it is the first and most influential .And it is the one which helped save the name , and give the work of this great genius to the world.

Rating:
Summary: Kafka's friend and biographer offers much insight
Review: This biography lets you on the inside of not only a great writer but on the inside of a close friendship between two writers and friends. It's written in a rather relaxed way, the way only good friends can be with one another. I read a biography on Kafka many years ago and it left me a bit indifferent about Kafka. This biography lets you feel the warmth and exuberance of the man, the everyday of this extraordinary writer. You can almost imagine yourself in his childhood home, meeting the family, understanding how Kafka became Kafka, how the seeds for his stories were planted and evolved. This biography had all the intimacy of an autobiography. Anyone who would like to know the tender underside of the beast, this is the biography you're looking for.

Rating:
Summary: Written before he was so famous
Review: Those of us who feel that Mozart might have been right, when he complained to his father about having to give music lessons for enough money to live, will find Max Brod entirely on our side in FRANZ KAFKA, A BIOGRAPHY, when it comes to "Philistines who are of the opinion that it is enough if genius has `a few hours free'--they don't understand that all the available hours barely suffice to guarantee to an even tolerably uninterrupted ebb and flow of inspiration and repose its right and proper far-flung arc of oscillation." (pp. 88-89). Kafka obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence on July 18, 1906, did a year of unpaid practice in the law courts typical for those who intend to be called to the bar, and tried to find a job with office hours that would be through at 2 p.m. each day. In July 1908, he began working at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Work is tiring, so "Kafka tried sleeping in the afternoon and writing at night. That always went all right for a certain length of time, but he was not getting his proper sleep." (p. 80). With television providing entertainment at all hours, and people eating enough to produce sleep apnea to wake them constantly for another gasp of breath after we are too fat to sleep normally, it is not surprising that people find themselves in a state of mind which matches whatever Kafka was writing.

I checked a few biographies to see how much emphasis had been given to Kafka's work on the job, since reading recently in a book by Peter Drucker that Kafka does not get enough credit for requiring people in the presence of falling objects to wear safety helmets. Max Brod had been a friend of Kafka in school, and worked for years in the post office while writing a book, so he was doubly aware of Kafka's attitude toward his work, because he allowed Kafka's feelings to determine his own occupation until he could no longer stand "Suffering that has been raised to a degree that can only be described as fantastic." (p. 81). Brod quotes a letter in which Kafka's attempt to describe his work is comical.

"people fall, as if they were drunk, off scaffolds and into machines, all the planks tip up, there are landslides everywhere, all the ladders slip, everything one puts up falls down and what one puts down one falls over oneself." (p. 87). When he was appointed a drafting clerk, all the new clerks had to listen to a member of the Board, who had "given them a talk which was so solemn, and so full of fatherly sanctimoniousness, that he (Franz) had suddenly burst out laughing, and couldn't stop. I helped the inconsolable Franz to write a letter of apology to the high official." (p. 87).

By December 28, 1911, Kafka complains in his diary that, due to his family's share in a factory "they made me promise to work there in the afternoons!" (pp. 89-90). Max Brod thinks this mess is responsible for "his later absorption into the world of sorrows that finally led to his illness and death. . . . but the disaster was essentially caused by the fact that a man so tremendously richly gifted, with such a rich creative urge, was forced just at the time when his youthful strength was unfolding himself, to work day in and day out to the point of exhaustion, doing things which inwardly didn't interest him in the least." (p. 91). This must be my favorite theme, in all of literature, that people are kept so busy, they would have to be fools to take the time to see what anyone else is doing. Kafka wanted to be able to depend on others "to keep everything running in the same good order as usual; for after all, we are men, not thieves." (pp. 91-92). This biography is written with the greatest friendly involvement in the life and death issues of its subject. At the end, concerning a medical report on July 14, 1908, "that Kafka, because of his affected nerves and `great cardiac irritability' had to give up his position" (p. 248) it was only to be considered an excuse "to transfer to the semi-government Accident Insurance Institute, where the work was considerably easier." (p. 248).

This biography will be most meaningful to those who are familiar with Kafka's writings. Many further items are also available. "Kafka's letters to Milena, her letters to me, and Janouch's recollections provide indispensable documentation for the period of Kafka's life in which THE CASTLE was being composed--documentation which is all the more important because Kafka's diary stops completely during the writing of the novel, and is relatively meager for the few years he had yet to live." (pp. 221-222).

Chapter VII, The Last Years, has the beginning of Kafka's friendship with Dora Dymant in the summer of 1923. At the end of July he left Prague to live with her in Berlin, published four stories and used the title, "A Hunger Artist" for the collection. On March 17, 1924, Brod brought Kafka back to Prague to live with his father and mother again. (p. 203). Taken to a Vienna clinic, Kafka was then "transferred at the end of April" (p. 204) to a sanatorium, where, "cared for in every way by his two faithful friends, Kafka spent the last weeks of his life--so far as the pains he suffered allowed it, patiently and cheerfully." (p. 205).

This famous biography was written in 1937. Appendixes include a chronological table which ends, 1952, Death of Dora in London (August). A postscript (p. 213) at the end of Chapter VII reveals that the first German edition ended at that point. Chapter VIII, New Aspects of Kafka, includes "we are faced with the inevitable distortion of his image." (p. 215).

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive,enlightening portrayal of Kafka.
Review: When one considers Kafka has had so much influence on literature that the word "Kafkaesque" was invented to describe his thoughts and effects on us (how many writers can claim their "own word"!),it is surprising that only three notable biographies on him exist. This one is by a man who knew Kafka closely for the last half of his life.When they met Kafka was 19, he died one month short of his 41st birthday.The author's reverence makes the reader become passionately attached to the subjects of Kafka's inner feelings; his reserved,taciturn approach to people, his obsession with pure thoughts, his sensitivity to noise, his devotion to the the earth,its humans,animals and plants. Even now, three quarters of a century later, the reader feels the exasperation, the frustration, the torment Kafka suffered under his materialistic, social climbing father who dominated and eventually ruined his son. The book cannot be called lively,Kafka's lifestyle was not frolicsome. However, it is never dull. His clandestine trysts with the sleazier side of Prague nightlife takes the reader by surprise.Then comes Brod's stunner of a revelation only unearthed in 1948, twenty-four years after Kafka's death.??? The last quarter of the book is the best.Intense and sorrowful, just as Kafka would have wanted it. For those looking for the intellectual side of Kafka the book offers insights into his appreciation of Goethe (his idol),Thomas Mann, Flaubert and Dickens, among many others. Brod's ace is his ability to quote the sensitive Kafka; viewing the fish at a Berlin aquarium after Kafka became an ardent vegetarian he is quoted, "Now I can at last look at you in peace,I don't eat you anymore". Also his reverence for all life as when a nurse placed flowers near his deathbed," One must take care that the lowest flowers over there, where they have been crushed into the vases, don't suffer. How can one do that? Perhaps bowls are really the best." And then the "humorous" Kafka on hearing that he had TB," My head has made an appointment with my lungs behind my back." When Kafka died tragically young he joined the likes of the Romantics Byron (36),Shelley (29) and Keats (25) as a group who had dedicated their lives to the betterment of mankind and had all died when life should have just been beginning. As with the Romantics,one is left wondering what Kafka would have achieved given another forty years. One will never know, but for an interesting observation of his 40 years,"Franz Kafka-A Biography" is the book.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive,enlightening portrayal of Kafka.
Review: When one considers Kafka has had so much influence on literature that the word "Kafkaesque" was invented to describe his thoughts and effects on us (how many writers can claim their "own word"!),it is surprising that only three notable biographies on him exist. This one is by a man who knew Kafka closely for the last half of his life.When they met Kafka was 19, he died one month short of his 41st birthday.The author's reverence makes the reader become passionately attached to the subjects of Kafka's inner feelings; his reserved,taciturn approach to people, his obsession with pure thoughts, his sensitivity to noise, his devotion to the the earth,its humans,animals and plants. Even now, three quarters of a century later, the reader feels the exasperation, the frustration, the torment Kafka suffered under his materialistic, social climbing father who dominated and eventually ruined his son. The book cannot be called lively,Kafka's lifestyle was not frolicsome. However, it is never dull. His clandestine trysts with the sleazier side of Prague nightlife takes the reader by surprise.Then comes Brod's stunner of a revelation only unearthed in 1948, twenty-four years after Kafka's death.??? The last quarter of the book is the best.Intense and sorrowful, just as Kafka would have wanted it. For those looking for the intellectual side of Kafka the book offers insights into his appreciation of Goethe (his idol),Thomas Mann, Flaubert and Dickens, among many others. Brod's ace is his ability to quote the sensitive Kafka; viewing the fish at a Berlin aquarium after Kafka became an ardent vegetarian he is quoted, "Now I can at last look at you in peace,I don't eat you anymore". Also his reverence for all life as when a nurse placed flowers near his deathbed," One must take care that the lowest flowers over there, where they have been crushed into the vases, don't suffer. How can one do that? Perhaps bowls are really the best." And then the "humorous" Kafka on hearing that he had TB," My head has made an appointment with my lungs behind my back." When Kafka died tragically young he joined the likes of the Romantics Byron (36),Shelley (29) and Keats (25) as a group who had dedicated their lives to the betterment of mankind and had all died when life should have just been beginning. As with the Romantics,one is left wondering what Kafka would have achieved given another forty years. One will never know, but for an interesting observation of his 40 years,"Franz Kafka-A Biography" is the book.