The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay [Hardcover]

Louis Begley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 2008

A new biography of Western literature's most iconic writer, from the acclaimed novelist and author of About Schmidt.

Kafkaesque: the very word evokes tortuous bureaucracy, crushing self-doubt, and an almost unbearable inadequacy in the face of higher powers. After Kafka, it can be said, literature was not the same. In the few novels and short stories he left behind, he distilled the horrors of the new age. Kafka's is the voice of the outsider—that is, the voice of each one of us—at once defined by its affiliations and completely, utterly alone.

The product of both a transitional age (the beginning of the 20th century) and a territory in flux (Czechoslovakia), Kafka spoke and wrote German in Czech territory. He was a Jew among Christians, a non-observant Jew among believers. Louis Begley, himself a multilingual exile and, like Kafka, a lawyer and writer, renders Kafka's life with sensitivity and insight. Begley's discussion of Kafka's masterpiece The Trial, along with shorter works such as "The Metamorphosis," opens a window on a tormented soul, one of the most intriguing figures of the modern period.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although numerous biographers have guided readers on a journey through Kafka's labyrinthine life and writings, celebrated novelist Begley (About Schmidt) cannily allows Kafka to speak in his own words as much as possible, weaving selections from letters, journals, novels and stories into a biographical narrative. Kafka's father wanted a law career for his son, but Kafka's will to write was so strong that he felt a constant trembling on [his] forehead. His period of greatest creativity came between 1912 and 1917, when he wrote, among others, The Metamorphosis and most of The Trial. Begley points out that many misread Kafka by making him synonymous with his characters. There has also, Begley writes, been an intense feeding frenzy of exegetes and other types of Kafka scholars circling around The Trial... one can almost hear scholastic dentures going clack-clack, subjecting the works to critical theories of every stripe. Begley's book emphasizes the importance of valuing the aesthetic and emotional impact of Kafka's work, offering a fresh glimpse of the tortured genius behind some of the 20th century's most perplexing and most rewarding writings. Photos. (June)
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From Booklist

Kafka may be the most influential twentieth-century fiction writer; his realistic fantasies of urban angst anticipated, so it seems, the predicament of the modern-to-postmodern citizen as an unworthy, petty, guilty, disposable cog in an inscrutable machine. In four long chapters on Kafka’s family and employment, his Jewishness, his love life, and his final illness, novelist Begley (About Schmidt, 1996) discloses how much Kafka’s protagonists owe to their creator’s character as a self-made man’s neurasthenic, diffident son; an irreligious Jew sentimental about the holiness of simple shtetl dwellers; an exasperatingly ambivalent suitor; and a stoical sufferer of a rapidly progressing, fatal disease. Yet those protagonists weren’t autobiographical, says the closing chapter on the major works, while it persuades us that they are so much alike that one shouldn’t feel guilty for reading only, say, The Trial and “The Metamorphosis,” and calling it quits with Kafka. Even in so economical a sketch of his life as Begley’s, Kafka tries one’s patience, and alas, Begley merely asserts rather than argues what a fine writer of German Kafka was. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Atlas & Co. (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934633062
• ISBN-13: 978-1934633069
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #743,729 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The bearable lightness of being (and reading) Kafka, July 2, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay (Hardcover)

Thanks largely to Max Brod and scores of subsequent literary commentators who read Franz Kafka through Beckettesque lenses, the image of Kafka most of us grew up with is of a tortured, self-loathing, desperately unhappy and hopelessly ill prophet who'd looked into the abyss, recognized the futility of existence and the absence of God, and tried to write about it in allegorical tales in which he's usually the thinly disguised protagonist. Given this settled picture of who Kafka is and what he's all about, plowing through one of his books can be a pretty grim task, unbearably heavy, dark, gloomy.

The virtue of Louis Begley's The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head is that he helps us take a fresh look at the author whom the "Kafkaesque" school of interpreters has almost ruined for many of us. Relying heavily on Kafka's own words in his journals and letters, Begley invites us to re-think Kafka. In the first place, he allows us to see that Kafka's personal life wasn't the ubiquitously dark and tragic closet thing it's commonly thought to be. Kafka was as capable of laughter, frivolity, calm, and immersion in the quotidian as the rest of us. He was well-known rather than reclusive during his lifetime, and entered with gusto into the wrangles and feuds typical of the literati. (Kafka tells us, for example, that he hates fellow author Franz Werfel because of his wealth, health, and youth.)

Second, Begley argues that there's an "intrinsic and unshakable humanism" in Kafka's work that is frequently overlooked by commentators and readers who've been trained to see his work as exclusively allegorical, darkly religious (or perhaps anti-religious), and politically prophetic. This doesn't mean that the dark side isn't in Kafka. It obviously is. It's just to say that it ought not be the one standard by which we read and judge his work.

Finally, Begley worries that these ideological readings of Kafka disregard in an almost total way the very thing that Kafka most wanted to be known for: the aesthetic value of his work. Kafka was a craftsman of the highest order who would labor mightily--some might say obsessively--over single sentences and paragraphs. He had a message he wanted to convey, naturally. But he also wanted to chisel beautiful word sculptures.

After reading Begley's book, I had two responses. First, I realized, with a great sense of relief and liberation, just how Brodbeaten I've been for years, and how Brod's gloomy interpretations of Kafka have diminished rather than enhanced my ability to appreciate Kafka--so much so, to be honest, that it's been years since I've even tried to read him. Second, Begley's book prompted me walk over to my bookshelf, take down The Trial, blow the dust off it, and begin anew.

What more could one ask from a book about Kafka?

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Frozen Sea, September 20, 2008

By 

Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay (Hardcover)

An extended essay that will be enjoyed by all who may be interested in the great writer Franz Kafka. Louis Begley, an intelligent and wise author, has produced a clear, concise review of the life and literary works of the man whose books provide an axe "for the frozen sea inside us."

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars KAFKA: HIS WORKS, HIS LIFE, HIS TIME, October 1, 2008

By 

CHARLES A. SARNOFF (NEW YORK, NY, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay (Hardcover)

FOR THOSE IN NEED OF A SHORT BUT EXPERT REVIEW OF KAFKA, HIS WORKS, HIS LIFE AND HIS TIMES, THIS BOOK FILLS THE BILL NICELY. EACH OF HIS WRITINGS ARE SUMMARIZED AND THEN RELATED TO HIS LIFE. THOSE THAT WERE NOT COMPLETED, OR POLISHED TO AN END BY OTHERS, ARE IDENTIFIED. A CHRONOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF HIS LIFE IS PRESENTED IN DETAIL. HIS FANTASY AND EMOTIONAL LIFE IS WELL PRESENTED, INCLUDING HIS DESCRIPTION OF HIS WRITING AS AN OVERFLOW OF FANTASY PUSHING HIIS CREATIVITY. HIS MEDICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC HISTORY [TUBERCULOSIS: FROM WHICH HE DIED AND MENTAL ILLNESS: WHICH SURFACED AS NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS ON 1/27/1922 AND END OF AUGUST 1922] ARE WELL DESCRIBED FROM A LAY ORIENTATION.