Reviews

• プラハという独特の場所

  カフカについての伝記です。類書との違いは、カフカの作品についての解説は最小限にとどめて、もっぱら彼の人生とその中でのイヴェント、特に女性との出会い、そしてカフカがその文学活動を作り出したハプスブルクの文化状況をを中心に描いている点です。彼の人生は、プラハという独特の場との関連で語られています。それはハプスブルク体制下でありながらウイーンとは異なった文化状況におかれています。そこでは人口の１０％しかしめないドイツ語が公用語であり、そのドイツ語を使う人々は皮肉なことにドイツ文化への同化を当然のこととしたユダヤ系がほとんどであるというねじれた構造になっています。このような場がカフカの生涯に与えた影響が、主に彼が残した膨大な書簡から分析されることになります。著者はhertzlの伝記をも残した人物ですが、特にカフカの晩年におけるユダヤ教への接近にかなりのスペースをいろいろな角度から割いています。最初はちょっと読みにくい部分もありますが、すぐに読み手をぐいぐいと引き込む作品です。

• Ernst Pawel is a wonderful writer. His book on Heine is very good too. This book is in many ways a work of art in its own right. Pawel is opinionated, but rarely boring. One feels he really knows that part of the the world in that time, what it felt like to be a German speaking Jew around the WW1 and thereafter. One feels Pawel is an insider, a bit jaded, always lucid, quick to catch the subtlest ironies in the unfolding of history. Of course Kafka's life itself was a great irony, as he only achieved wide recognition after his death and after he thought his novels had been destroyed. A bit like Van Gogh. Pawel is himself a great stylist. He does not go gently into the night. He rants and raves with zest, but he always hits the nail on the head, and he keeps you on the edge of your seat. The only chapters I found a bit slow were at the beginning about Kafka's schooling. Then it really picks up. Kafka's quite successful career as company man (who knew?), his family woes, his flights of passion, so often platonic, his body wracked by ill health, his struggle to translate his spirit to the page. Why read Kafka? When you hit your mid fifties and realize that just maybe, you are just who you are and the world is just as it is and that there aren't any pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, then it's nice to find a writer who keeps it real, keeps the difficulty and intractability of things real. And as you cease chasing the dream, you can lay yourself to rest in your self so to speak, as it is, just be content and accepting of yourself. And then you see a lot of new things, discover new vistas and angles. I leave you with an example of Pawel's prose: "Prague, the little mother with claws that Kafka once proposed to put to the torch,is a vision of time frozen in space, lopsided and full of sloping planes;the past predominates, distorts all other dimensions, blunts the sharp angle between day and night, and warps the solid coordinates of reality."

• Parts of this biography are not as good as others, but on the whole Pawel succeeds admirably in evoking the "Nightmare of Reason" that was Kafka's life. Himself having worked in insurance and written novels, Pawel is well qualified to argue that Kafka was a much better insurance manager than his own accounts would indicate. Also evoked is the genius of Kafka as a writer, which again contradicted his own highly critical assessments of his success. As the subtitle, "A Life of Franz Kafka," suggests, this is much more about the great writer's life than about his works, but it includes an extended and truly insightful assessment of "The Trial." It reads in part, "Kafka in the first days of World War I . . . wrote a novel that with blinding lucidity evokes the spirit of the new era" [the twentieth century that the war effectively inaugurated]. "In chronicling [the protagonist] Joseph K.'s struggle to discover the nature of his guilt, the identity of his judges, the letter of the law, and his stubborn efforts to pit reason and common sense against the flawless logic of a sentence based on a verdict beyond rational comprehension, Kafka quietly, without fanfare, without stylistic extravagance or verbal excesses, demolished the solid, taken-for-granted certitudes of nineteenth-century realism with its black-and-white contrasts and sharply defined outlines." Pawel concludes the biography with a more general assessment: "His work is subversive, not because he found the truth, but because, being human and therefore having failed to find it, he refused to settle for half-truths and compromise solutions. In visions wrestled from his innermost self, and in language of crystalline purity, he gave shape to the anguish of being human." As these quotations suggest, Pawel's own assessments of Kafka truly evoke this unique and troubled soul's struggles and achievements.

• This is the 2nd biography of Kafka that Ive read. General commentary shows that this 1984 effort might be the best biography out there. In his bibliography [p.449] Pawel notes that -- "The literature dealing with Kafka and his work currently [i.e., 1984] comprises 15,000 titles ...." Wow. I had no idea. This book is great for grasping the life of Kafka. It is so very difficult to make sense of his books & stories; reading this book gives you a chance to get something right. But it duz not attempt much actual literary criticism. I took 6 pages of notes in the front papers of the book. Im reading up on Kafka becuz I think I have some insight into some of his works. Like, 2 short stories -- "A Country Doctor" & "The Judgment" -- are both dreams. Internal evidence in both stories can only be reconciled by interpreting them as dreams. Read them with that idea in mind -- that they begin in medias res with the main character actually dreaming. I think that "A Country Doctor" might even be a love story with a happy ending! Like, the last time the doctor mentions hearing his bell -- in the very last sentence -- it could be Rose in the kitchen ringing the bell! And he is going to wake up from this awful dream & go down to a hot breakfast! Dreams, however, play little role in "The Trial." But abundant internal evidence reveals that Joseph K. only gets what is coming to him. Well, yeah -- Execution is kind of overdoing it! Just read Chapter 1 of "The Trial" & pay attention to the multiple micro-aggressions that K. commits. He indulges himself in 3 micro-aggressions on some individual pages. I count 41 micro-aggression in just Chapter 1. Joseph K. is a very, very subtle narcissist! Pawel's book does not help with explication -- but it captures the complexity of Kafka's life. Good luck if you are searching elsewhere for help with understanding Kafka. I mean with actual critics. As far as I can tell, the actual criticism of Kafka's work is gibberish.

• This is a very well written biography, but it takes a long time to get going (well, so did Kafka). The first hundred pages are, it must be admitted, a real slog through pre-war, Czech-German-Jewish cultural struggles. It picks up when the writing begins in earnest, and becomes simultaneously hilarious and moving when we move into Kafka's desperate "fox chewing off its own leg to escape the trap" dealings with his love life. The most horrifying part of the book is the constant refrain about many of the people in the book -- fascinating lives, followed by "killed in a concentration camp in X." Kafka's sister Ottla and some of the other people are, in the now overused term, unsung, forgotten heroes, noble souls. The reader is constantly brought up against the hideousness of the, as yet, unknown future. There is not much in this biography about the writings, except for a few judicious paragraphs (and quotations: Tucholsky's review of "In The Penal Colony" from the period is worth the price of the book alone).

• Excellent book that gives you both the life of the author, a fine overview of the very complex times in which he lived, and the forces that shaped Kafka's life. Highly recommended.

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