99 years ago, on June 3, 1924, the author of the Trial died at the age of forty years and eleven months of laryngeal tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna. Never married – but engaged three times, including two with Felice Bauer –, without children, Franz Kafka has seen the sea three times and experienced a world war.
Born in Prague in 1883 into a Jewish family of German expression, deputy head of service at the Workmen’s Compensation Insurance Office, he had made literature the center of his life. Without ever having known it, he is one of the major writers of the XXe century.
In the edition of his complete works, the texts that Kafka estimated to have finished only count for 350 pages. As for the rest, the thousands of pages of newspapers, the 1500 letters, a few stories and three unfinished novels, perhaps he would die a second time knowing that today we can read it — thanks to his friend Max Brod who chose to ignore his will.
“At the moment when Kafka attracts more attention than Joseph K., the process of Kafka’s posthumous death is announced”, writes Milan Kundera in The art of the novel. And if any biography is perilous, that of Kafka represents a challenge of another magnitude. A feat that the German Reiner Stach succeeds in an exciting way, recounting this life too brief and “without stories” in three volumes of 900 pages each, published in German between 2002 and 2014.
A monument that seems to echo the inner density of Kafka who, however, as a writer, “leaves a field of ruins behind him”. Although the richness of his existence unfolded for the most part on the psychic level, “in the invisible” – an impression reinforced by reading his diaries – he “was neither innocent, nor pure, nor disembodied, nor asexual,” his biographer tells us.
Unusually, The time of decisions begins in the middle, covering the years 1910-1914 (the next two volumes are due out Fall 2023 and Spring 2024), as Kafka begins his Log. Particularly fertile years on the creative side: The verdict, THE gone, Metamorphosis, etc. Kafka burns and throws away a lot, juggles strategies to write at night. Between the Prague apartment where he lived with his sisters and his parents — of whom he feels like a stranger, just like part of the great human family — between his office job and the family store, Kafka feels trapped, hating everything that is not literature. “Simply, for me it’s a terrible double life which probably has no other possible outcome than madness”, he even wrote one day to his boss.
It is a period during which it is possible for us to track “the great bachelor of world literature”, almost day after day through his letters and diaries. An abundant material which is added to the historical horizon of the time and which leads, under the pen of the biographer, to a striking reconstruction of the universe which could be that of Kafka.
Rigorous, lively and erudite, exciting without ever romanticizing (“nothing is invented”), Reiner Stach makes Kafka before our eyes, paradoxically, a real character from a novel. A marvel of biography.