one biography that agrees with me

Yet another follow-up to the last two posts. One biography that got me thinking of this point is Reiner Stach’s 2004 work in German, Kafka: Die Jahre der Entscheidungen. (Oh, I just checked and it’s been AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH AS WELL SINCE 2005. And according to this advertisement, there are two more volumes coming, which if I had heard, I had forgotten it.)

This book runs to 605 pages, but covers Kafka’s life only for the years 1910 to 1915 (age 27 to 32 for Kafka).

The fact that Kafka was never really fully “discovered” during his lifetime meant that he never became a successful institution, perhaps satisfying to live as but boring to read about. Even so, it’s an interesting experiment to begin a biography not with Kafka’s parents meeting and getting married, but with Kafka in person struggling to figure things out.