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The Diaries of Franz Kafka

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Edited by Max Brod

 
 

 

 

Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague where he lived a life of near-obscurity. Belonging to a middle-class family of German-Jewish extraction, he grew up in the shadow of his authoritarian father, in relation to whom Kafka not just shaped his own self-worth but also the protagonists of most of his novels – invariably trapped in the claws of an abstract authority. Following his early academic success, he went on receive a law degree in 1906. A secure job allowed him to make writing the essence of his life. He worked as an insurance clerk until tuberculosis compelled him to retire in 1922. He spent a great deal of his time in health resorts and sanatoriums till his death in 1924.

Practically unpublished and unknown during his lifetime, Kafka wrote in German, using the same imagery of nebulous existence in an indifferent world that symbolises modern man's predicament. A fraction of his shorter fiction published during his lifetime included Meditation (1913), a collection of short prose pieces; The Judgment (1913), a long short story; and The Metamorphosis (1915). While the last two deal with the outsider, In the Penal Colony (1919) is a parable of a torture machine and its operators and victims. The Country Doctor (1919) was another collection of short prose. He left unfinished A Hunger Artist (1924), four stories centring on the artist's inability either to negate or come to terms with life in the human community.

The helplessness of the flesh, even when the spirit rebelled against a hostile environment, was so strongly pervasive through his writings that it came to be identified as a syndrome – an existential dilemma loosely called "Kafkaesque" for its impotent wrath.

Max Brod
Czech-born, German-language novelist and essayist Max Brod is primarily known as one of Kafka's closest friends and associates. Brod later became the editor of his major works that were published after Kafka's death. The diaries, which he had instructed Brod to burn upon his death, were organised and edited by Brod.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka
One of the most widely read authors of the last century, Franz Kafka is also one of the most elusive. His private journals – starting from 1910, to a year before his death – make an earnest effort to peel the mask off the enigmatic Kafka. Illuminated by a heightened self-awareness, Kafka's diaries make for an unsparing keyhole into a life that was lived with as much intensity as it was guarded with fierce introversion. The essence of Kafka is revealed through notes on life in Prague, accounts of his dreams, his relationship with a domineering father, ambiguous feelings for his fiancée he never married, his struggles and triumphs as a writer. Revered as one of Kafka's major literary works, the complete diaries of Franz Kafka, the man and the artist, are available in one volume.

 
Paperback
Pages 448
Price US $ 6.95
ISBN 81-87981-47-4

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