Synopses & Reviews
This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--
The Trial,
The Metamorphosis,
The Man Who Disappeared (
Amerika), and
The Judgment. These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.
Kafka: The Decisive Years is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.
Review
"Most impressive is Stach's recounting of the creation of his subject's writings. . . . Stach's own writing is wonderfully expressive."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
"A scrupulous, discriminating, and highly instructive account of Kafka's life."--Robert Alter, New Republic
Review
"Stach aims to tell us all that can be known about [Kafka], avoiding the fancies and extrapolations of earlier biographers. The result is an enthralling synthesis, one that reads beautifully.... I can't say enough about the liveliness and richness of Stach's book.... Every page of this book feels excited, dynamic, utterly alive."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
Review
Stach's is a splendid effort and will be hard to surpass. Michael Dirda - Washington Post Book World
Review
A masterpiece of inspired biographical writing. William H. Gass - Harper's Magazine
Review
Probing. . . . Essential reading. Choice
Review
Magnificent. Booklist
Review
Stach develops the various elements that play a role in Kafka's life brilliantly. Die Zeit
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The first great biography of Franz Kafka ... exciting and instructive from the first to the last page. Der Spiegel
Review
This extraordinary biography fills the empty spaces between Kafka's own writings and the writings of friends, family, and contemporaries with so much empathy and imagination that one can't put it down. Tagesanzeiger
Review
One of The Guardian Best Books of 2013, chosen by Colm Tóibín
Review
"[S]uperbly tempered. . . . [T]hrough this robustly determined unearthing he rescues Kafka from the unearthliness of his repute. . . . Shelley Frisch, Stach's heroic American translator, movingly reproduces his intended breadth and pace and tone. . . . In this honest and honorable biography there is no trace of the Kafkaesque; but in it you may find a crystal granule of the Kafka who was."--Cynthia Ozick, New Republic
About the Author
Reiner Stach worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka's collected works before embarking on this three-volume biography. The third volume, Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton), covering Kafka's final years, is also available. The first volume, covering Kafka's childhood and youth, is forthcoming.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
PROLOGUE: The Black Star 16
1At Home with the Kafkas 21
2Bachelors, Young and Old 42
3Actors, Zionists, Wild People 54
4Literature and Loneliness: Leipzig and Weimar 71
5Last Stop Jungborn 86
6A Young Lady from Berlin 94
7The Ecstasy of Beginning: "The Judgment" and "The Stoker" 108
8A Near Defenestration 119
9The Girl, the Lady, and the Woman 134
10Love and a Longing for Letters 145
11Exultant Weeks, Little Intrigues 159
12The Bauer Family 169
13America and Back:
The Man Who Disappeared 175
14The Lives of Metaphors: "The Metamorphosis" 192
15The Fear of Going Mad 206
16Balkan War: The Massacre Next Door 226
171913 231
18
The Man Who Disappeared: Perfection and Disintegration 242
19Invention and Exaggeration 253
20Sexual Trepidation and Surrender 266
21The Working World: High Tech and the Ghostsof Bureaucracy 281
22The Proposal 297
23Literature, Nothing but Literature 324
24Three Congresses in Vienna 350
25Trieste, Venice, Verona, Riva 368
26Grete Bloch: The Messenger Arrives 379
27An All-Time Low 390
28Kafka and Musil 401
29Matrimonial Plans and Asceticism 413
30Tribunal in Berlin 433
31The Great War 444
32Self-Inflicted Justice:
The Trial and "In the Penal Colony" 464
33The Return of the East 484
34The Grand Disruption 493
35No-Man's-Land 508
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 517
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 519
KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS 521
NOTES 523
BIBLIOGRAPHY 551
PHOTO CREDITS 563
INDEX 565