This certainly seems to be the year, or the season, of Kafka. Who knew that the enigmatic Czech writer, who died before he completed any of his three major novels—Amerika (more properly translated as The Missing Person, and appearing in Mark Harman’s fine new translation from Schocken come September), The Trial, and The Castle—and whose stories of a clerk awaking to find that he has transformed into a cockroach or singing mice or talking dogs, would be commanding so much attention these days? Of course, you’re not likely to find the sunny Florida or California beaches full of young or old folks boldly displaying The Trial, The Great Wall of China, or In the Penal Colony, but positive interest in him and his work abounds these days.

I have already written here about two new books—one already out and the other soon to be released—that capture various aspects of Kafka’s life and work. Novelist Louis Begley offers one of the best examinations of Kafka’s Jewishness in his The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay (Atlas& Co./Norton). Weaving selections from Kafka’s letters, journals, novels, and stories into his own biographical narrative, Begley follows Kafka from his early desire to write and his need to for quiet to compose and his well-known relationships with Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenkà, and Dora Diamant through his tuberculosis and death. Begley’s little book offers a fresh glimpse of the tortured genius behind some of the twentieth-century’s most perplexing yet most rewarding writings.

In an hilarious but somewhat unconvincing book, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life (St. Martin’s), James Hawes attempts to debunk the many myths surrounding Kafka’s life. In this swaggering and often contentious introduction to Kafka, Hawes draws on Kafka’s stories, diaries, and letters, as well as cultural documents of Kafka’s time as he asks the real Kafka to please stand up. Although Hawes’s book will provoke many Kafka scholars because he debunks deeply entrenched views, his invitation to experience Kafka by reading closely his stories rather than his biography encourages a fresh understanding of Kafka.

In a few years, we’ll have the translations of two German biographies—Peter Anders-Alt, Franz Kafka: Der Ewige Sohn (C.H. Beck) and Reiner Stach, Kafka: Die Jahre der Erkenntnis (the second volume of Stach’s biography, the first of which appeared as Franz Kafka: The Decisive Years)—that offer even more insight into our enigmatic little Czech.

A little over sixty years ago, in 1947, Kafka was receiving a similar amount of attention. Ten years earlier, the Muir’s translation of The Trial (the standard translation until about a decade ago when Schocken embarked on its project of retranslating Kafka) had appeared. Kafka’s diaries were translated between 1937 and 1947, and new collections of his stories began appearing rapidly in these years. Schocken published Kafka’s close friend’s Max Brod’s Franz Kafka: A Biography, and a now-defunct publisher called Twice a Year Press published A Franz Kafka Miscellany, a collection of translated scraps of Kafka as well as essays on his work. New Directions published a collection of essays and memoirs titled The Kafka Problem, and Paul Goodman, the author of the now-classic Growing Up Absurd, released Kafka’s Prayer. Then, as now, Kafka commanded the attention of the literati. Then, as now, the question remains, “Why?”

In 1947, at least, one literary critic stepped forward to try to answer the questions and found Kafka wanting in some respects. In his “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka,”—collected in Classics and Commercials—the dour and redoubtable Edmund Wilson offered his own one-of-a-kind take on Kafka. “Kafka has been looming on the literary world like the meteorological phenomenon called the Brocken specter: a human shadow thrown on the mist in such a way that it seems monstrous and remote when it may really be quite close at hand, and with a rainbow halo around it . . . Kafka’s reputation and influence have been growing till his figure has been projected on the consciousness of our literary reviews on a scale which gives the illusion that he is a writer of towering stature.”

Wilson is having none of this, however. He observes that the essays in The Kafka Problem “build [Kafka] up as a theologian and saint who can somehow also justify for them . . . the ways of a banal, bureaucratic and incomprehensible God to sensitive and anxious men.” As much as he admires Kafka, Wilson finds it “impossible to take him seriously as a major writer,” and he has “never ceased to be amazed at the number of people who can.” Wilson goes on: “To compare Kafka . . . with Joyce and Proust and even with Dante, great naturalists of personality, great organizers of human experience, is obviously quite absurd.” In the end, Wilson questions Kafka’s ability to act as some moral guide or exemplar for contemporary individuals. “What he has left us is the half-expressed gasp of a self-doubting soul trampled under. I do not see how one can possibly take him for either a great artist or a moral guide.”

So, in the midst of all this contemporary interest in Kafka, why, given Wilson’s criticism, should anyone read Kafka today? Who really, for that matter, reads Proust or Joyce these days, except for the earnest literature major or the reader already deeply immersed in the worlds of Dublin or Combray? Will reading Kafka help us understand ourselves or our world any better than David Sedaris or Dave Eggers or Michael Chabon (to name only a few darlings of the moment, some of whom owe their creative existence to Kafka, whose work is insubstantial at best)? Is Wilson right after all, that Kafka is not a major writer?

I’m certainly not prepared to argue that Kafka is on par with Joyce or Proust; his writing didn’t challenge the literary conventions of the time in the same ways that Finnegans Wake or In Search of Lost Time did. However, Kafka’s contemporaries, from Hermann Hesse to Robert Walser, praised his writing for the ways it captured the eccentricities of the bureaucracies of his day. They also praised it for its dreamlike quality and for its Flaubertian emphasis on details.

Why read Kafka today? At the very least, Kafka offers us a portrait of a time much like ours in which a secretive bureaucratic government tramples on the lives of individuals in the name of the law and justice. Kafka also speaks to us in his portraits of hapless individuals searching for meaning in a world that has somehow lost its order and its coherence, a world not unlike our world. What happens when that world transforms individuals into creatures whose families don’t even recognize them or fail to support them? What happens when our families fail to recognize us and our wants, needs, and desires or when they actively strive to suppress those desires? As a matter of fact, what happens when we read books? Do we enter other worlds where we can live richer or more sordid lives? Do we enter worlds that are more ordered and coherent than ours? Isn’t that why we read? If so, we should be reading Kafka today if only to embrace with him his maxim that a “book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us . . . if the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?” 


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Contact Henry.