Franz Kafka - Diaries, 1910-1923

Franz Kafka - Diaries, 1910-1923 (Schocken Books, 1988).

ISBN: 9780805209068 | 528 pages | EPUB

Though Franz Kafka is one of the greatest and most widely read and discussed authors of the twentieth century, and continues to be a tremendous influence on artists of our time, he remains an elusive figure, his life and work open to endless interpretation.

These diaries reveal the essential Kafka behind the enigmatic artist. Covering the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty, they provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s world — including accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt and feelings of being an outcast, and his struggles and triumphs in expressing himself as a writer.

Available in one volume, the complete diaries are not only indispensable to an understanding of Kafka the man and the artist, but are a compulsively readable, haunting account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.

Reviews

"In Kafka we have before us the modern mind splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate reality there is—yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham. Thus he knows two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be a God. It is the perspective of the curse: the intellect dreaming of its dream of absolute freedom, and the soul knowing of its terrible bondage." — Erich Heller

"It is likely that these journals will be regarded as one of [Kafka’s] major literary works; his life and personality were perfectly suited to the diary form, and in these pages he reveals what he customarily hid from the world." — The New Yorker

"What seems to hold [the diaries] together is a kind of ruthless honesty and self-awareness." — New York Times