Anais Nin once wrote that a personal world lived deep enough transcends the truth in all universes. Those words have never been more applicable to any writer other than Franz Kafka. And in this book you can see why. I remember reading it throughout a whole couple of nights, unable to force myself to stop, absolutely fascinated by a world constructed so delicately, yet unabatedly-sentence by sublime sentence into a marvellous prose edifice. I can still recall one entire setting where he just describes a billowing shawl of a woman waiting in winter for a train. This is not art but is simply beyond art. We can never be grateful enough to Max Brod for preserving the manuscript against Kafka’s wishes, which I regard as one of the two most significant events in twentieth century literature. The other of course being Sylvia Beach deciding to publish The Ulysses. ( )