Kafka’s Last Love
For a while, I liked to think that I was in the process of collecting every book by or about Franz Kafka. Currently, I have 23 books by or about Franz Kafka. You know the fiction, the diaries and the letters, but of the secondary texts, there are some fascinating (and difficult to obtain) books: Franz Kafka: the necessity of form by Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka’s Loneliness by Marthe Robert, Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch (I’m indifferent to the fuss over its alleged inauthenticity) and The Nightmare of Reason by Ernst Pawel, probably the best biography.
Now there’s Kafka’s Last Love by Kathi Diamant. It tells the story of Dora Diamant (no relation to the author) who � well, read this fine, short review by Michael Hofmann in the Washington Post (a publication that has had at least one other fine short review recently!). The stuff about missing documents is heartbreaking. Strangely, annoyingly, the British edition doesn’t appear until August.
Nowadays, I just think I’m in the process of reading all those books.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Happy Birthday Franz Blow up the balloons, ligh…
- A Note on Kafka
- Zadie’s Kafka
- Judgement Day again
- The Man Who Disappeared
