#Kafka writer trial#

That may sound like a pleasant pastime, but we get aphorisms such as #15: “Like a path in autumn: no sooner has it been swept clean than it is once more covered with dry leaves.” Stach suggests that the frequency of images of paths and walking in the texts may flow from Kafka’s having ample opportunity to take walks in the rustic setting of Zürau.

Here, Kafka takes a cliché and upends it, conveying his appreciation of what Stach calls “a new, utopian dimension: the opportunity of standing on solid ground without the obligation, much less compulsion, to share this ground with any group.”īut Kafka’s request to Brod to destroy his manuscripts tells us that he had not found a vocation that he hoped would win him success and acclaim, and aphorism #24 contrasts with others where Kafka gives voice to a sense of the difficulty or impossibility of knowing what to do in this life or, in a figurative sense, where to go. In aphorism #24, Stach suggests, Kafka takes a new direction and revels in practicing an art for which not everyone has a gift. In his commentary, Stach contrasts this utterance with Kafka’s use in letters and comments to other people of the more familiar trope of a writer lacking a more staid vocation and not having solid ground to stand on. Aphorism #24 reads, “Grasping the good fortune that the ground on which you stand cannot be larger than the two feet covering it.” He voices meritocratic ideas and implies that the role of a visionary writer is not for everyone. The Kafka we meet in the aphorisms might not make much of a diversity and inclusion officer today. Stach’s commentary offers context and interpretations for each of the 109 aphorisms. Ranging from a few paragraphs to a few words, they seem to come from that older writer and thinker we never got to know. They recall the sayings of Heraclitus or Confucius in their distillation of the kind of wisdom gained over a lifetime of study and reflection, with no small amount of irony and contempt for the foibles of the more blinkered members of our species.

#Kafka writer trial#

The absence of more mature work to read and consider is a precondition of our having any works of Kafka at all, Roth suggests.īut the aphorisms, assembled by biographer Reiner Stach and r eleased in a handsome edition by Princeton University Press, with the aphorisms and Stach’s commentary translated by Shelley Frisch, help us bridge the divide in a speculative way between the Kafka who wrote The Trial and The Castle and other macabre and haunting works, and the older self. If he had lived, he would never have been, at least in anything close to the form that mesmerizes Roth and others all these years later. Kishka.” Roth considers the dilemma facing devotees of Kafka’s work. “Looking at Kafka” imagines Franz as a 59-year-old Hebrew school teacher in New Jersey, a dull, doddering egghead with no published or unpublished writings to his credit and no love from Roth or his friends, who could be out playing ball if they did not have to study ancient calligraphy with the one they call “Dr. Kafka gave instructions to his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, and, Roth speculates, would have taken the task into his own hands had he lived into the 1930s and 1940s and faced the necessity of fleeing Europe to avoid the Nazis and the death camps. In his essay “Looking at Kafka,” Philip Roth reflects on the irony of wishing Kafka had lived longer. He went to Zürau to rest after a pulmonary hemorrhage, and not quite six years later died from tuberculosis at the ripe age of 40. Franz Kafka gained a lot of insight into human nature during his relatively brief life, and nowhere is it more on display than in the aphorisms he jotted down in notebooks while staying with his sister Ottla in the town of Zürau, in what is now the northwestern part of the Czech Republic, for eight months beginning in September 1917.įor much of his life, Kafka’s health was precarious.