Customer Reviews

A Biography of Kafka

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This biography is quite simply unlike anything else I have ever read. It is good enough to rank among my favourite fiction novels, because it has an attention to story that I rarely experience in biography. Ronald Hayman achieves this startling effect partly by dropping us into Kafka's story at a crucial point in his artistic career, just after finishing one of his finest stories (Das Urteil), and continuing from there, without a drop in the intensity. We are left to infer most of the technical details of Kafka's life from other sources, or simply from the timeline included before the biography.

I can't tell you how many literary biographies I have read that fail to make this simple step of beginning in the right moment, how many times I have put down a biography because it started out by telling me the story of the figure's father's father. What I am interested in is the core of the writer, the things they could not tell about themselves. Kafka was a man of such self-doubt and anguish that he cannot be expected to tell his own story with enough truth or detail. This book illuminates everything that is compelling about Kafka, the man who devoted himself so completely to literature that there was hardly anything left for the rest of his life, and who deserves nothing less than to have his sad story told so exceptionally.