Franz Kafka Books

These are Kafka's best letters . He pours forth his broken soul to the woman who can and does understand him. His language is painful and beautiful. Milena the Czech woman married to another Jewish man is too trapped by her life. Their love is impossible also because Kafka within himself is impossible. The letters are powerful and bring a sense of compassion and loss for these two remarkable people who each in his own way ( Kafka through his tuberculosis) Milena ( in a concentration camp) lose their lives when young.

These letters written by Franz Kafka to Milena comprise my most loved Kafka letters. Writing to Felice, his former fiancée, he was less mature - could he be said to have been less himself? In 'Letters to Milena' he asks at one point (I paraphrase) 'Is it you I really love or the existence that you give to me?' Couldn't any of us ask this question of the person we really love and of ourselves when we really love? I think Milena, whom his biographers considered a far more fitting companion for Kafka than Felice; Milena who in Berlin, years younger than the ageless Franz, living desperately and often pennilessly with her loved hurtful husband (who frequently withheld money from her, so that at one point she worked as a railway porter) - this woman who 'lived her life down to the depths' and who was a writer in her own right - really did give Kafka existence in the years they wrote and too infrequently met. She did not let the nervous, procrastinating and intensely self referential Kafka hide from her - which may be part of why he loved her - and when he is finally prevailed upon to visit her, deliciously drolly reassuring her that if he does get onto a train he will likely as not get off it at the right stop, she does not wait until they each arrive at the much discussed meeting point to actually meet him, but goes unflinchingly to his hotel, cutting off Kafka's apprehensions, making everything in their meeting easy, amicable and precious to him.

'If only it were possible to go to Berlin, to become independent, to live from one day to the next, even to go hungry, but to let all one's strength pour forth instead of husbanding it here, or rather - instead of one's turning aside into nothingness!' Kafka wrote in his diaries in 1914 whilst still engaged to Felice. Milena, for a little while, allowed him to feel he was living, the tragedy was that concurrently Kafka's terrible illness was progressing, depriving him of time and physical energy. He was a man who needed so much time, and who had so painfully little, but, notwithstanding his not infrequent sensation of 'turning aside into nothingness', Kafka lived, he lived his whole life as few, very few, ever do, these letters are a testimony to his intense aliveness and to his genius as a writer. I envy Milena, even though she knew eventually she could not leave her husband for Kafka, she was still the woman who received the treasure of these letters. And yet - a reader has to, bewildered, witness and realize the inevitability and sadness of the eventual cessation of Kafka and Milena's communication, witness Kafka poignantly losing his plans for their future and the idea that Milena can live with him, witness both withdrawing and both mourning.

'M was here', Kafka wrote (again in his diaries, 8th May 1922, when he was more or less housebound with his illness) 'won't come again; probably wise and right in this, yet there is perhaps still a possibility whose locked door we both are guarding lest we open it, for it will not open of itself.'

I treasure this book. I've read and reread it so that the pages are all dog-eared, falling out and closely annotated all over. To anyone who finds themselves drawn to Kafka I'd say get your hands on a copy or two.

Franz Kafka's great love, Milena Jesensky, was arrested in 1939 and sent to the Nazi concentration camp in Ravensbruck. There she met Margaret Buber-Neumann (author of this book), also a writer. A friendship developed and they made a pact: whoever survived would tell their story. Milena died in the camp three weeks before D-Day.The book is riveting: both in its depicting the pre-war life of Milena's family, her intellectual friends, and her relationship with Kafka as well as the horrors of camp.
It is surprising that nobody made a film about those two remarkable women; I suppose Hollywood can not be bothered; they are too busy planning for the production of something along the lines of "The Rise and Fall of Janet Jackson's Nipple".

Milena Jesenka was an ethically principled Czech journalist who in 1939 was arrested and sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbruck. There she met Margete Buber- Neumann another political prisoner. They became close friends, and determined to write a book about their experience when the war was over. Three weeks before D- Day Milena died. This book is the story of their friendship and of the life of Milena.
It is a very moving work. And it also has a chapter on the relationship through which Milena became a part of world- literary history, her her relationship to Franz Kafka.

What happens when one imposes meat-eating on the other? What happens when the one doing the imposing happens to be your own father? And what happens when such carno-terrorism--to borrow from Jacques Derrida--becomes allegorical, representative of an inability to speak? In "Letter to His Father," Franz Kafka (a self-championing vegetarain harboring something akin to a body dismorphic disorder) coughs up a catalog of paternally-driven injustices and imagines a gastronomic utopia inimical to Daddy's sadistic table regime. Often overlooked, "The Letter to His Father" belongs right up there with Kafka's other canonized marvels. Go ahead and chew on it for a while.

A Letter to my Father by Franz Kafka is a look into the mind of one of the most talented (but also unhappy) writers of the 20th century. It's a very personal account of the relationship between Kafka & his father, his strong, controling, tough father who was the main figure who influenced Kafka's life & way of thinking. Franz Kafka talks with great pain in this 'letter' about his childhood years & how his father controlled everyone in the household, how the writer's own personality was shaped & molded by this one relationship. After reading this letter, the reader is closer to understanding the person that wrote "Metamorphosis" & "The Judgment".

Each letter of the Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament) alphabets have a standard numeric value assigned them. By taking the spelling of a word or phrase from the scriptures and then taking the sum of the numeric values, astonishing correlations can be seen. Many key phrases, for example are multiples of 111, which is the number of God. Jesus, spelled in Greek, for example, totals 888.

ANOTHER CODE has been discovered.In this code, the numeric value of a word is taken and then that number is looked up in the Old or New Testament lexicon, revealing amazing correlations, further evidencing God's hand in the authorship of the Bible.

Word 888 in Greek, for example, means "useless," which is how Jesus was treated by his own. Word 890 in Hebrew (just two after) includes the word "useless" in its definition. The theomatic value of the Hebrew spelling of Messiah is 358. Zodhiates (NT Greek Dictionary) gives "useless" as a synonym of word 358 in Greek.

Statistics can be lots of fun. Sports fans especially agree, citing various records professional luminaries as Jerry Lucas still hold, decades following their retirement from competition. Yet, statistics are not the essence of the ball player, but simply an outline, or at best, a suggestion of their talents.

Per example, watching Michael Jordan make a play renders the statistics meaningful. And when the game is over, the season ended, in the years that ensue, conversations sparkle with the memories. Remembrances sweeten with age at how many times 'so-and-so' stepped to the foul line to drill how many buckets in how many games against what teams in how many seasons.

Accordingly, all that are so blessed to be enamored of the Word of God never tire in describing the wonders and riches of Holy Writ, and still in the end resort to quoting it to adequately conclude their remarks. Numbers, like in Theomatics and sports statistics, merely outline the glory of the subject, whetting the appetite for more.

Intriguingly, Del Washburn's introduction of Theomatics, with a game-winning assist enjoyed by Jerry Lucas, begins the search for pefection in God's Word with the mathematical equation. 'Theomatics' is in fact a manufactured term the authors agreed upon when no term existed that defined the discipline upon which they were embarking.

To reduce Mr. Washburn's work to numerology is to reveal a woefully obvious lack of understanding. Likewise, to equate Theomatics with the discipline of ELS is to compare apples with oranges.

Theomatics displays more facets of perfections in God's Word. ELS discovers the substantively prophetic fibres only eternity's realms will afford the space to plumb.

Now that is a fruit salad to yearn for. If Mr. Washburn's work is true to his expectations, the aligning of those two disciplines would expose to the world even greater depths of His Law 'settled forever in Heaven'! {Psalm 119:89.}{TNKJV}

"Your Word is very pure; therefore Your servant loves it." {Ps. 119:140.}{Ibid.}

TL Farley,
author,
When Now Becomes Too Late,
Distant Reaches

When Now Becomes Too Late
{ Prophecy : The Rapture In Brief : Inside The Twinkle ! }

Distant Reaches
{ True Life Adventure In Ireland, Boston and On The North Atlantic }

Marthe Robert Kafka 's principal translator into French has written an original and insightful study of his work. She calls it a ' psychological biography' Its chapters are: The Censored Name, the Identity Crisis, the Road Back, the Thorbush, Before the Law, Escape , Fiction and Reality.
Here is a small sample of her analysis"If one attempts to deal with him from the standpoint of a theologician, of a philosopher, of even of a literary critic, it turns out that Kafka is never where the concepts want him tobe; he never quite corresponds to one's view of his interests and aims, especially not in the realm , so inadequately described, of his relations with Judaism and the Jews, where every writer tends to appropriate him according to the writer's own requirements. Assimilated Jew, anti- Jewish Jew, anti- Zionist, Zionist, believer, atheist- Kafka was indeed all of these at different times in his development, sometimes all at once( he wrote Investigations of a Dog in 1922 at a time when he had almost become a militant Zionist) but none of these characteizations throw the least light on the underlying reasons for his struggle , or the form it took, or explains how it was possible for the pathological indecision of a constantly torn man to give rise to the most rigorous modern art, the only art, perhaps in which modernity and rigor have really been combined. " p.27
One more point . In her first chapter Robert connects Kafka's hiding , censoring of his name not only with his Jewish identity but with the Biblical prohibition of writing the Divine Name, of spelling it out explicitly. This is the kind of suggestive insight that makes this work a valuable one.

This biography is quite simply unlike anything else I have ever read. It is good enough to rank among my favourite fiction novels, because it has an attention to story that I rarely experience in biography. Ronald Hayman achieves this startling effect partly by dropping us into Kafka's story at a crucial point in his artistic career, just after finishing one of his finest stories (Das Urteil), and continuing from there, without a drop in the intensity. We are left to infer most of the technical details of Kafka's life from other sources, or simply from the timeline included before the biography.

I can't tell you how many literary biographies I have read that fail to make this simple step of beginning in the right moment, how many times I have put down a biography because it started out by telling me the story of the figure's father's father. What I am interested in is the core of the writer, the things they could not tell about themselves. Kafka was a man of such self-doubt and anguish that he cannot be expected to tell his own story with enough truth or detail. This book illuminates everything that is compelling about Kafka, the man who devoted himself so completely to literature that there was hardly anything left for the rest of his life, and who deserves nothing less than to have his sad story told so exceptionally.

Herberth Czermak has put together a somewhat different Cliffs Notes volume for looking at "The Metamorphosis" and other stories by Franz Kafka. Certainly it would a bit much to devote an entire little yellow book with the black stripes to the story of Gregor Samsa, although clearly it is Kafka's most important work. But the biggest difference is that this is a Cliffs Notes where the emphasis is on commentary to the exclusion of summaries of the works being discussed. You will not find a synopsis of these stories and you certainly will not understand the first-rate commentary and analysis if you have not read the stories in the first place. What you will find is detailed analysis that will help you understanding the writings of Franz Kafka. You have been warned.

Czermak's notes on the Life and Background do more than get into Kafka's biography, they set up the author's focus on "angst" and put "The Metamorphosis" in the context of his body of writing. In his Commentaries on Kafka's stories Czermak continues to cross-reference other works, which certainly suggests all sorts of comparison/contrast possibilities for class discussion. The Kafka stories examined here are: "The Judgment," "A Hunger Artist," "A Country Doctor," "In the Penal Colony," "The Hunter Gracchus," "The Burrow," "Investigations of a Dog," "A Report to an Academy," "The Great Wall of China," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk." After the Commentaries on the Stories, Czermak provides four short essays that cut these works, "Understanding Kafka," "Kafka's Jewish Influence," "Kafka--A 'Religious' Writer?" and "Kafka and Existentialism." This last essay is the most relevant because most students find existentialism to be an interesting thing to look at and "The Metamorphosis" is as good a place as any to begin exploring that major literary movement.

Suchoff bases his far-ranging analysis of three major novelists of modernity - Dickens, Melville, and Kafka - on the stimulating intellectual frame inspired by the now classic Frankfurt School theorists - Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin - and by their interpretation of history, which goes back to the first half of the twentieth century. Against the anti-historical reading of culture, the Frankfurt School claimed that artefacts contained the traces of their dialectical links with their times and that art worked against the grain of hegemonic representations, thus carrying out an essentially redemptive role in the domain of culture. According to Suchoff, this approach can still offer innovative and meaningful interpretations of the modern novel, capable of highlighting the oppositional role played by mass culture in and through texts, in the face of what he regards as reductive and conservative readings of modernism. Starting with Victorianism, Suchoff then discusses how the commodification of the novelist does not suppress Dickens's subversive rewriting of Victorian stereotypes. He concentrates on "Little Dorrit" to retrace in the subtext of this emblematic and most decent novel a repressed narrative of sexual abuse and unspeakable violence against women, a narrative that is nevertheless voiced by eloquent textual clues. Melville's work is interpreted as a powerful and devastating revision of American myths of power, destined to shipwreck like Ahab's ship, the Pequod. Finally, Kafka is analysed as a writer who thoughtfully comes to terms with Jewish identity, Zionism and political action, against the interpretative cliché that would deny his involvement with the challenges of his times. Suchoff's analysis manages to combine both sound theoretical knowledge and clever textual analysis, capturing the making and remaking of ideology in the discursive layers of the literary artefact. Doubtless, his convincing interpretation of these three major writers, who are so diversely engaged with history, makes his book not just an interesting contribution to the large corpus of criticism on Dickens, Melville and Kafka in the widening field of cultural studies, but a stimulus to apply such critical tools to other texts.

These diaries tell the story of a great writer's struggle with his life and work. They are filled with remarkable poetic lines and with great psychological perceptions. Kafka's genius is felt in every line he wrote, and it is a difficult pleasure but a real one which can be obtained from reading this work.

The essence of Kafka is in these parables and paradoxes. In these short pieces many of them excerpts from longer works we can feel the heart of his puzzling, mysterious, unique genius. Also in them we feel the way Kafka makes of a seemingly abstract argument a mystery story . There are parables on many different subjects, from Quixote and Sancho, to the Great Wall of China, and from Prometheus and the Vulture, to the Parable itself. Often there are variants of the parable and variants of the paradox and Kafka makes us feel not simply how elusive a single definition of a reality can be, but how wonderous and strange it can be also.
Of course in Kafka there is also dread , anxiety and a whole sense of the world as being somehow stranger than we can think or even imagine .Even the everyday details of life which Kafka is so much a master of making into parables of poetic beauty turn mysteriously into something else which we cannot really hold in mind or finally define.
Who reads this book reads a work of genius, the condensed essence of one of mankind's most original literary minds.
What a pleasure what a wonder what a dream.