Kafka: A Biography [Hardcover]

Nicholas Murray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2004

Although Franz Kafka (1883–1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father.
Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka’s German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka’s demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka’s poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka’s story “The Judgement,” about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka’s books—stories suffused with guilt and frustration—derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime.
Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.

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.
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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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 440 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st edition (September 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300106319
• ISBN-13: 978-0300106312
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,286,760 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.