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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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