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Loading... Kafka: The Decisive Yearsby Reiner Stach
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) KENNERLYDAN | Jul 11, 2021 |  Particularly important is Stach's tracing of Kafka's relationship with Felice Bauer. ( ) stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 | )2  S.D. | Oct 18, 2014 |
 One could credit Stach with a bold anti-interpretative stance if he weren't so aware of having missed the figure of Kafka among all the ruins of his life. Here is a definitive biographer who at least has the odd grace to acknowledge his own predicament. "A profusion of data can obscure our view, have a mind-numbing effect and stifle new ideas," he writes. "Consider that Walter Benjamin's extraordinary sketches about Kafka were written without any knowledge of the particulars of Kafka's life." Sometimes it's better to love a writer than to know him.  Mr. Stach’s is a consummately Kafkaesque biography. With every piece of the vast mosaic at hand—the thousands of pages of diaries, letters and fiction, the tottering heaps of ancillary research—Mr. Stach holds it all up to the light piece by piece, turning it over and over and then putting it away, at last, with a puzzled frown. Indeed, he seems to question the validity of the whole biographical enterprise: “The best we can say is, It may have, could have, must have been this way.” Well, yes, but only a bore—albeit a good bore (a “hermeneutically dutiful” bore, as Mr. Stach puts it)—would bother to say so. Belongs to SeriesKafka (2) Is contained inAwardsDistinctions
The acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings-- The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)833.912Literature German and related languages German fiction Modern period (1900-) 1900-1990 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.72)
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