Volume 29, Number 1 · February 4, 1982
The Logic of Franz Kafka
By V.S. Pritchett
Kafka: A Biography
by Ronald Hayman
Oxford University Press, 349 pp., $19.95
Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice
by Elias Canetti, translated by Christopher Middleton
Schocken, 94 pp., $5.95 (to be published in March) (paper)
Letters to Ottla and the Family
by Franz Kafka, edited by N.N. Glatzer, translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston
Schocken, 130 pp., $15.95
After his critical biography of Nietzsche, Ronald Hayman has turned to Kafka; from the prophetic self-enlarging Superman to one who assuaged his sense of estrangement from his family and society by diminishing himself. There was an air of humility in this, but there was pride in an evasiveness: or, if not pride, a marked obduracy. His capital is stored in his anxieties and humiliations: his abnormally self-centered genius was able, by the fabulist's sleight of hand, to make his parlous situation appear to be our own. When we read The Trial and The Castle again now Kafka also seems, by accident, even to have prepared us for the faked political trials we have seen since the Thirties. One can say, at any rate, that deformed in his own private life, he became absorbed in what has come to be called the metaphysic of a bureaucratic nightmare in which one is born powerless, accused and self-accused, not knowing of what.
Review, 2488 words
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