Kafka: A Guide for the Perplexed

Reviews / Votes

'This is a marvellous book, presenting Franz Kafka's life in vivid detail [as much detail as has emerged] and integrating readings of his texts with this living dynamic. Koelb contends that Kafka offers us a "warehouse of writing", with no one kind of text fully autonomous: the fiction, the diaries, the letters, the office writings . . . Kafka himself was of course a convinced modernist -- "I am nothing but literature", he wrote in his diary -- and we have inherited that conviction from his friend and editor, Max Brod. But there is so much to be gained from a post-modernist weaving of fiction into life. Even as he deftly annotates some of the famous stories and never-completed novels, Koelb is happy to leave macro-thinking to new and excited readers. Only if they are Perplexed is he offering a Guide. And yet: no one should miss the inspired single-page analysis of "A Country Doctor." -- Professor James Rolleston, Duke University, USA