A judicious, balanced assessment that makes palpable both Kafka’s personal weirdness and his artistic mastery.
An astute analysis, by the German editor of Kafka’s collected works, of the remarkable half-decade in which the Prague-based modernist wrote his best-known stories.
Given the impact of Kafka’s fraught relations with his family, especially his father, on his writing, it’s odd that Stach chooses to begin this first entry in a projected three-volume biography in 1910, when Kafka was 27 years old. His days were passed as an insurance official, a commitment he dutifully fulfilled while devoting his nights to his art. Stach ably delineates the writer’s peculiar personality—vegetarian, hypochondriac, utterly estranged from the bourgeois preoccupations of his Jewish relatives, yet unable to even move out of the family apartment—without ever exploring the childhood roots of his stunted character. This major caveat aside, the biographer does a brilliant job of examining in depth the adult Kafka’s transmutation of his neuroses into exacting, unsettling fiction that captured the unease of a world confronting modernity but still constricted by 19th-century conventions. Discussing “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial and “In the Penal Colony,” Stach pays equal attention to themes, autobiographical content and Kafka’s precise prose and resonant metaphors. He also acutely examines the writer’s on-again-off-again romance with Felice Bauer, conducted primarily through letters (this up-to-date career woman had a demanding job in Berlin and her ambivalent suitor seldom left Prague). Though Kafka rarely noted world events in his diaries and letters, he was deeply affected by the Yiddish theater and Zionism; Stach assesses the influence of these historical trends as ably as he delineates the vibrant German-language publishing scene. This vivid recreation of a complex man and his milieu closes at an appropriately uncertain moment: one year into WWI, which spurred Kafka’s strongest efforts yet toward autonomy and a life dedicated wholly to literature, even as it made such a life virtually impossible.
A judicious, balanced assessment that makes palpable both Kafka’s personal weirdness and his artistic mastery.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100752-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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