Kafka
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
This gripping biography of the great Czech novelist, diarist and short story writer chronicles Kafka's entire (if tragically curtailed) life (1883-1924), but it focuses upon the writer's relationship to his father and his inheritance as a member of the Jewish mercantile bourgeoisie in Prague. Born into a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1919 yet through his work he is one of the most modern of writers. While previous works have concentrated on Kafka and his women, Nicholas Murray will concentrate on his extraordinary relationship with his father which found its most eloquent literary expression in the story 'The Judgement' written in 1912 when Kafka was twenty-nine:in a reverse Oedipal move, the father condemns his son to death by drowning. This work is essential for an understanding of the intensely private and complex Kafka and the kind of writer he turned out to be - the creator in THE CASTLE, THE TRIAL and METAMORPHOSIS (the dazzling short story whose hero wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect) of some of the defining literature of the 20th century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The story is well known: the frail, anxiety-ridden young man in Prague who suffers under an overbearing, uncouth father. Every day he trudges off to his boring job at an insurance company. He is drawn to women yet agonizes about every relationship. At night, he writes away but wins scant recognition. He contracts tuberculosis, and his last, truly miserable years are spent in and out of sanatoriums. His final wish is that all his manuscripts be burned, but his best friend violates the request. Within a few years of his death in 1924, Franz Kafka's writings about characters ensnared by the world around them for no apparent reason are recognized as brilliant manifestations of literary modernism. Murray (Bruce Chatwin, etc.) is an experienced biographer and effectively relates Kafka's brief life, trying valiantly to depict a more normal Kafka, a man who lived in society with good friends, enjoyed sex, had wide-ranging intellectual interests and became enamored of Judaism. In Murray's account, Kafka's employer valued him highly, and under the imprint of no less a figure than Kurt Wolff, he experienced some literary success. Despite Murray's best efforts to contain Kafka's idiosyncrasies, though, the writer remains the tormented soul who created out of his personal anxieties and agonies some of the most acclaimed works of the 20th century.
