According to Deleuze & Guattari, we have suffered too long amidst the retrograde critical judgements of mainstream Kafka scholarship. Ad nauseum, these pedestrian hacks have given us Kafka the alienated loner, Kafka the neurotic metaphysician, Kafka the theological invert, Kafka the gynephobic prisoner of ascesis, Kafka the self-hating Jew, Kafka the suicidal insomniac. Scholars have made their reputations by sending this great author on greased skids to Hell, earmarking him as an avatar of the Negative, a nodal point of absurdity and paradox, the pilgrim of an epic and hallucinatory Guilt Trip (partly at fault are the Muir translations, which categorically pitch the Kafkan voice as a syntax of doom and alienation). No doubt Kafka suffered immensely in his professional, family, and erotic life, in the anti-Semitic maw of Czech nationalism, in the iron-maiden of terrors both historical and metaphysical, but critics who reach their limit in expounding the pain and absurdity of the Kafka trajectory are providing us with a false and incomplete picture of this sublime literary event.

D & G decided to bring the hammer down on these reflexive doomsayers, to restore some of the joy and vibrant panache to Kafka studies. They wanted to bring him "'a little of this joy, this amorous political life that he knew how to offer, how to invent. So many dead writers must have wept over what was written about them. [We] hope that Kafka enjoyed the book that we wrote about him'"(xxv). It is useful to recall the evening Kafka read the opening chapter of *The Trial* to his circle of literary friends, assailed by roars of laughter, Kafka himself laughing so hard he had to constantly stop reading to wipe tears from his eyes. The ramifications of this episode have been repressed and overturned by the necrophilic martyrology of a reflexive Kafka scholarship. For here we have gone beyond any mere "laughter of the Abyss," the impish cackle of "black comedy," the doomed precincts of Camus's "cosmology of the Absurd." Kafka's hilarity is a laughter of resistance, of felicity, of squeezing some measure of freedom out of our peremptory and obstructionist universe. As argued in this text, the battle is within and against the political, economic, technological, bureaucratic, judiciary, and linguistic machines which held Kafka's language in thrall to its obstacles and terrors.

Here is a cento of principles developed by D & G in their dissenting text, the prolegomenon to any future in Kafka scholarship:

1. Isolation from the Law is not merely the absence of God (coinciding with the SNAFU of metaphysical realism) but rather entails the eternal suspension of judgement, ultimately an Artaudian desire "to have done with Judgement."

2. The question of ASCESIS. Deleuze has long underscored the idea that when a writer or philosopher espouses an "ascetic" lifestyle it is only as a means to achieving a more subterranean pitch of libertinism (or Life). Kafka had plenty of opportunities for conventional happiness, to live the life of a Max Brod, for example. Rather he followed the witch's wind of literary apprenticeship, a far profounder Life although, from a judgemental distance, appearing monstrous and ill-fated.

3. Kafka's oeuvre is characterized by a complete lack of *complacency*, and stands accordingly as a total rejection of every problematic of Failure. His suicidal fantasies, then, were not merely an agonizing cry of despair, but also a series of unmerciful thought-experiments designed to charge the literary machine, to clear the waters for fresh speculation.

4. Reflexive scholarship tends to move backward from unknowns to knowns (i.e. the castle is God, the beetle is oedipal frustration, the penal colony is fascism, the singing mouse is a writer, and writers are those who express CONTENT and represent THINGS). Rather we should take Walter Benjamin to his limit, by acclimatizing ourselves to a mode of literature "that consists in propelling the most diverse contents on the basis of (nonsignifying) ruptures and intertwinings of the most heterogeneous orders of signs and powers"(xvii).

5. Renovate the battlefield...: reterritorialize Kafka's "metaphysical" estrangement onto the concrete political arrangements with which he engaged throughout his life. Understand the political or "fantasmatic" nature of Kafka's simulations, that his fictions are not merely an allegory of resistance to fascism, but the infiltration of a ruptured sensibility into the fascistic functioning of the Law, a node of deterritorialization inside the torn apart.

6. The desire for innocence is as pernicious as the fetishization of guilt, since both imply an Infinity by which we can define and calibrate Judgement. Justice is desire and not law. Desire is a social investment traversed and legitimized by Kafka's literary machine, which "is capable of anticipating or precipitating contents into conditions that...concern an entire collectivity"(60), which speak for a people that may not be prepared to live through its message.

Perhaps I'm trying too hard to cram difficult arguments into tiny hard-to-swallow capsules. The text itself has to be read to be believed. Perhaps in response to those who felt *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* did not provide enough "concrete examples," D & G have steered their war-machine onto one of the most treacherous and misunderstood literary oeuvres of the preceding century. The result will either leave you cold (as is the case with virtually every reader I've conferred with on this text) or revolutionize your jilted perceptions of a great author.

The detailed concepts on how Gilles Deleuze read Kafka still amazed me. To understand Deleuze, one must read Deleuze in relation to Kafka.

This little book, actually, "letter" will get to your heart. Its one of the most human prose I have ever read, the intimate conflits in a father-son relationship. No not stop until you find it, you will not regret it.

Definitely read this book if you can ever find it and if you like Kafka. It's a deeply personal, open-minded, unapologetically contradictory analysis of the relationship between one over-bearing, opinionated father and his timid son. One of the best books I've read

For the reader new to Kafka as a writer, there is a lot of baggage to be thrown off: everything implied by the cliche 'Kafkaesque' we've gathered from films, other books and the like (alienation, angst, modern man and the Absurd, the terror of totalitarian bureaucracy, etc.); everything, in other words, that has made a caricature of an original vision.

So, for the first-time reader of Kafka, there are some pleasant surprises in 'the Metamorphosis'. The novella is often very funny - Gregor's orientation to his condition (he enjoys running up the walls and hanging off the ceiling) and the reaction of his family and manager provoke some priceless farcical set-pieces. It is a Gothic story - about a salesman who turns into a monstrous vermin, and the aghast reaction of his family; there are some unexpected frissons in the story we would normally expect from the horror genre. It is a portrait of a complacent middle-class family in decline, a la Galsworthy, or a study of the artist in an impoverished family with a weak but aggressive father, like Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. There are even elments of sentimental melodrama in the way Kafka loads up the sympathy for his monster in the face of almost caricatured hostility - I found myself welling up once or twice.

This is not to diminish Kafka's dark and frightening vision, just to suggest how much of his art depends on play, with narrative modes and genres, with narration, with reader's expectations. The horror, anxiety, unease, if you like, is actually quite marginal on the surface - the oppressive vastness of his familiar bedroom as perceived by Gregor in his new form; the endless vista of an adjacent hospital. It's under this surface that the true anxiety lies - the gaps in the narration, the unreliability of Gregor's perceptions and interpretations, the ambiguity of Kafka's language, the witholding and gradual unfolding of details. There don't seem to be any mirrors in the Samsa household, but the story is full of mirror-like tableaux - the portrait of the lady in furs; the photo of Gregor as a young soldier; the image of domestic life viewed every evening by Gregor in darkness.

If only all classics were treated with the respect of this edition. the translation is mostly smooth and fresh, with occasionally clumsy constructions and jarring Americanisms (are there really trolleys and foyers in Kafka's world?). The critical apparatus provides endless intellectual nourishment - manuscript revisions revealing the precision of Kafka's writing; an account of the story's genesis, creation and background through letters, diaries and related Kafka works; and seven critical essays from perspectives as varied as feminism, psychoanalysis, new-historicism and linguistics, some infected by the usual blights of literary criticism (e.g. undigested globs of French theory making argument and prose impenetrable; distortion of text to produce biased interpretaions), but which insightfully open up the astonishing density and ambiguity of a 40-page fable, offering ingenious, mutually excluxive, even contradictory readings that are all very plausible, and yet ultimately miss Kafka's elusive enigma.

Professor Stanley Korngold translates Franz Kafka's novella, "The Metamorphosis" (1915), and edits this Norton Critical Edition. Even though Korngold's translation was done in 1971, it stands as an excellent idiomatic rendition of the original German manuscript. Korngold includes in this volume a section entitled "Kafka's Manuscript Revisions," which reflects more recent German scholarship. Korngold's page-by-page annotations to the novella elucidate details which serve to clarify the text for close readings. Following the novella, ("Die Verlandlung," in German), is a section of pertinent exerpts of Kafka's Letters and Diaries. The next section of the volume, "Criticism," contains a collection of seven essays, which were written between 1970-1995. A Chronology of Kafka's life and work and a Selected Biography are also included.

Professor Korngold has done a masterful job with this edition of "The Metamorphosis." Kafka's masterpiece, according to Korngold, "...is perfect, even as it incessantly provokes criticism." For the transformation of Gregor Samsa into the "monstrous vermin" disturbs readers who want and need to "control" the text. To do otherwise is to accept the hopelessness that is at the center of Samsa's existence. For the uninitiated readers, who are often first-year university students in required literature courses, "The Metamorphosis" often defies facile interpretation. Thus, the critical essays, which include poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, cultural, and historicist literary theories about the novella, are very helpful to frustrated students who may have been given essay assignments. Of particular note is Korngold's critical discussion of Kafka's "literalization of the metaphor."

My suggestion is to read "The Metamorphosis" first (in this excellent Korngold translation) and to note one's immediate reactions to the text. Then, one can explore the other sections of this critical edition at one's leisure. Finally, one can re-read the text again. ("The Metamorphosis" is short enough that it can easily be read in one sitting.)

This Norton Critical Edition is highly recommended for inclusion in first-year university literature curriculae, as well as for AP high school English or World Literature courses. Franz Kafka was one of the literary geniuses of the twentieth century, and "The Metamorphosis" is an excellent introduction to his writings.

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".

Not as famous has his other books, but a brilliant piece of imagination that creates a story about a young man who has disgraced himself and is packed off to America by his family. (even though the author never actually went there).

There are plenty of absurd events and events that are straight out of a bad dream.

The hero of the book battles on through an America that has thousands of people living out the American dream, crowding at counters and taking advantage of him, as well as helping him out.

A very good book.

Franz Kafka: A Question Of Jewish Identity by Sara Loeb (inter-disciplinary researcher and expert on Western culture, Central European Judaism, and Holocaust Literature) is a meticulously presented, in-depth focus on the life, philosophy, and Jewish identity of the renowned author Franz Kafka. An extensive and scholarly study that contemplates Kafka's friendship with Max Brod, reflections on the Diaspora, assimilation vs. self-hatred among Jews, and much, much more, Franz Kafka: A Question Of Jewish Identity is highly recommended for students of Kafka's writings as an unusually thoughtful, albeit sometimes technical account of the man, his life, thought, and work.

THe 600+ page biography of Kafka is the most detailed and carefully researched available in English. Fascinating and readable account of one of the 20th century's most misunderstood writers.

If you have read Kafka you won't need my advice. But if you haven't, I recommend you to buy this book, "A Hunger Artist" is an incredibly impressive short story. It plays with reality and imagination and at the end it all seems like a dream. Also take a look at Kafka's diaries.

For lovers of the works of Franz Kafka, Citati's lyrical biography sings his praises in impassioned tones. Citati masterfully interweaves exerpts from Kafka's classic writings with his own enlightened commentary, while at the same time providing a lucid chronology of the life of the elusive genius. At times Citati's prose is nearly as beautiful as Kafka's. Through Citati's eyes we come to embrace Kafka's achingly personal musings with a new understanding. This is not so much a book for scholars as it is a joyous celebration for those readers who devour Kafka and hunger for more!