Kafka again
Do we need another biography of Kafka? Nicholas Murray has written one anyway, due next month. Oh dear, I want to read it.
First there was Max Brod’s. No-one will claim that is definitive. Then there’s Ronald Hayman’s K, which is pretty good, like all his biographies (I read his Proust twice!), and Ernst Pawel’s The Nightmare of Reason, perhaps the best one. A decade on came Frederick Karl’s ridiculously-entitled Kafka: Representative Man and Peter Mailloux’s perfectly-entitled A Hesitation Before Birth (a line from the Diaries). One could add Jeremy Adler’s and Klaus Wagenbach’s neat little picture-based biographies too. Even the biography of Kafka’s Last Love, Dora Diamant, is worth reading for the extraordinary presence of Kafka evoked in her story.
One forthcoming book about Kafka I would really like to read is Stanley Corngold’s Lambent Traces. Such an oddly attractive title too. What can it mean? Answers on a postcard please …
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- A Note on Kafka
- Kafka’s Last Love
- A cage in search of a bird
- Kafka and Smog The secondary literature on Kaf…
- Judgement Day again
