Diaries 1910 - 1923

I started reading the Kafka diaries with motive of a trip that took me to the Czech Republic and gave me a chance to spend a few days in Prague by myself. Having been enough times in Prague to want to play the tourist again and feeling a uncontainable need to dig further into Kafka's mind --perhaps motivated by the reading of many works by Enrique Vila-Matas where the Diaries are quoted over and over-- I decided to fetch this book from the public library in Helsinki and let myself get lost in the Prague where Kafka spent most of his life. The heat was unbearable during most of these August days, and I walked and sweated more than I managed to read, but the trip and the diaries, both, have turned my understanding of Kafka's genius in a show more fascinating direction.

A man suffering from a weak phyisical condition that kept him ill more often than not, depriving him from strength for anything that he would deem important; a man who spent restless nights tormented by what he himself considered an unability to actually properly write or to write at all; a man frustrated by his relationship with his family; a man haunted by such a vivid imagination that even his dreams and nightmares would not let him in peace; a man whose relationship with women and sex was so full of contradictions and yet was beyond the intensity that his own body and minde were able to bear: all of this combined in a brief but fruitful span of perhaps 15 years at most is what makes for the violent mix that fueled Kafka's creative genius. How else could, back in the days when Realism predominated literature, turning oneself into a gigant insect-like creature would have been even a possibility, if it wasn't for the uncountable nightmares and dreams of Kafka's nights?

But not only an insight into Kafka's mind is to be found in these diaries. Not only an understanding of his suffering. There are also plenty of wonderful observations of his everyday life. Descriptions so vivid and intense of the most mundane situations that one can only admire: Kafka was not only a genius in his creativity but also in his written accounting of the world. If this was not enough, there are plenty of sketches of what later became full-literary works and many other sketches that, unfinished, unpolished, and all, sometimes even in single paragraphs still account for more literary genius than one can find in entire novels.

The diaries are not easy to read, that must be cleared out. They demand fierce strength and above all, patience with the tormented writer. The many depressing paragraphs can wear one down at times. Yet these diaries deserve careful reading by anyone seriously interested in literature, the mind of a genius, and the origin of anything Kafkaesque. show less

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 show more significant events in twentieth century literature. The other of course being Sylvia Beach deciding to publish The Ulysses. show less

Kafka writing that he can't write is better writing than most writers out there.

Kafka writing that he can't write is better writing than most writers out there.

Mission: Impenetrable. I reached Page 25 then decided enough was enough. Good luck, reader.

still the purest writer i know.