Biography of Franz Kafka Hb Np [Hardcover]

Murray Nicholas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

So intrinsic is Kafka's work to the modern sensibility that its unnerving power has been concentrated into one broadly useful word, Kafkaesque. And so mythologized has his life become, it might seem as though there is nothing left to learn. But as adept biographer Murray (his previous subjects include Aldous Huxley and Bruce Chatwin) proves, Kafka's stunningly fabulistic, emotionally intense, and socially discerning fiction yields new revelations with each reading, and Kafka's cruelly abbreviated life (he died of tuberculosis at 40 in 1924) holds fascinating, heretofore unexamined revelations. Clarifying and companionable, Murray portrays the precocious, hypersensitive, curious, and angst-ridden Kafka as a born artist with a "deep ambivalence toward his family," especially his bullying father, and as a successful executive--Kafka was an industrial risk assessor for a workers' insurance institute, the source of his searing vision of the pitiless aberrations of bureaucracies and factories--who despaired suicidally over having too little time to write. Murray judiciously explicates Kafka's obsessive romantic entanglements, illuminates his savvy navigating of Prague's tricky and anti-Semitic cultural politics, and parses Kafka's influences, particularly his love for Yiddish theater. Kafka's work remains as galvanizing as ever, and now the literary genius himself emerges whole and vital. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown Hardbacks (a & C) (June 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316724793
• ISBN-13: 978-0316724791
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,513,828 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A responsible general biography, November 12, 2007

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kafka: A Biography (Hardcover)

This biography of Franz Kafka can be recommended for the general reader in every way except one: it is not the best biography in English of Kafka or the one to read if you wish (as most people) to read only one. I preferred Ernest Pawel's "The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka," which has more color and passion and comes closer to bringing Kafka to life as a three-dimensional figure. (It may be out of print, but it can easily be found on the secondary market.)

Murray's biography is well-written, readable, and responsible, although a little dry and pedestrian. In addition to surveying Kafka's life satisfactorily -- via a somewhat artificial four-part structure (Prague, Felice, Milena, and Dora, the last three being the three women with whom Kafka had the longest and most meaningful relationships) -- Murray also discusses and properly places Kafka's literary works in the context of his life without ever engaging in academic literary exegesis. Thus, this is very much a biography for the general reader, and if the Pawel biography cannot be obtained, one need not hesitate about turning to Murray's.