Biography: Kafka
by Nicholas Murray

One of the problems with writing a biography on a writer, especially one like Kafka, is that so many primary sources already exist that describe his life.

Though his fiction was fragmentary, his personal correspondence was voluminous – he wrote countless letters and kept diaries that would surely create the most complete picture of him – if anyone had the patience to read through it all….

Luckily we have Murray, who sifts through the thoughts of poor tortured Kafka and keeps the essentials necessary to understand the writer’s life.

Murray does this well enough, with his own interpretations interspersed, but the structure is a little annoying– I’d say a fourth to a third of the entire text is Kafka’s own words i.e. direct quotations. Thus, the structure goes something like this:

“(Kafka’s thoughts on something)”
–Murray’s restating the above and adding a thought
“(Kafka’s thoughts on something)”
–Murray’s restating the above and adding a thought
etc. for many, many pages.

This makes sense as Murray had so many appropriate quotes straight from the horse’s mouth, but it still gets a little wearing. Also, there are no real breakthroughs that shed new light on his life; most of the content is as expected. There is however, a section with a number of photographs included.

Whether or not you find this bio interesting depends on your tolerance limit for the endless stream of neurotic, hopeless thoughts which fill the pages from start to finish. If you were writing a bio of an interesting person, the end result would obviously be more interesting than the bio of a boring person. Some lives are more fascinating than others — this is not the biographer’s fault. Thus, in this book, when Kafka is in one of his gloomy, rambling moods (which is almost always) our first instinct is to unfairly blame Murray for our lag in interest.

Anyways, if you can bear Kafka’s hopelessness, you’ll get a detailed study of Kafka’s writing schedule, the chains which bound him to his day job, his numerous failed love affairs and the textbook-Freud hate-worship relationship with his father culminating in his outpouring: “Letter to the Father”.

If you like Kafka’s fiction, it is essential to read a good biography of the man to understand the impossible-to-miss parallels of his stories and his life. Kafka’s fictional works, particularly “The Trial” and “Metamorphosis” ARE autobiographies and Murray drives this point home.

The biography is laid out in sections, each titled with the name of Kafka’s love interests (Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenska, Dora Diamant) as these women roughly define the mental phases of the writer at the time. The Felice section is the most tortuous to read. Kafka had met the woman once, and after that single meeting, poured out hundreds of letters to her proclaiming his love and trying to describe the his frenzied depression.

The beginning parts describe his childhood, later we learn of his hypochondria, visit to prostitutes, nude exercises, vegetarianism (in a restaurant he was overheard looking at some fish and saying “now my friends I can look at you with a clear conscience”), hatred of noise, interest in Zionism, inability to commit, minor publishing successes, and his dying wish to friend Max Brod: that all his papers be burned upon his death. (Luckily for us Brod published the works instead)

One area that I was curious about was not mentioned in depth: what historians think of Kafka’s mental state medically. Kafka’s Fear of Life bordered on insanity, and in the hellish streets of Prague, writing was his only outlet, described by him as something sacred. If he was alive today he would almost certainly be in therapy and hepped up on Prozac.

Anyways, if you can get past the slightly boring and repetitive structure, this is an excellent read on The Writer Who Saw Too Deeply….

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