Now this is really a strange book. As I'm German this was on the "to read" list in school. But to be true I enjoyed this story of a boy who finds himself transformed to an Insect. You certainly think that this book was written by a lunatic. But that is also where the fascination lies. I'd say read and see for yourselves!

Kafka is brilliant, as most anyone who reads this book will soon realize. He dealves into different ranges such as the Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). Possibly a little far out there due to his style for some, but I doubt it. The English translation is required reading in my IB school, but the german version (recommended by my Austrian teacher) was even better. One can delve deeper into the metaphor through the feelings behind every word and phrase. Kafka, like many Jews and people of that era, was the victim of severe isolation. Die Verwandlung portrays this feeling perfectly. This is bar none one of the best pieces of literature I have ever picked up.

This biography lets you on the inside of not only a great writer but on the inside of a close friendship between two writers and friends. It's written in a rather relaxed way, the way only good friends can be with one another. I read a biography on Kafka many years ago and it left me a bit indifferent about Kafka. This biography lets you feel the warmth and exuberance of the man, the everyday of this extraordinary writer. You can almost imagine yourself in his childhood home, meeting the family, understanding how Kafka became Kafka, how the seeds for his stories were planted and evolved. This biography had all the intimacy of an autobiography. Anyone who would like to know the tender underside of the beast, this is the biography you're looking for.

When one considers Kafka has had so much influence on literature that the word "Kafkaesque" was invented to describe his thoughts and effects on us (how many writers can claim their "own word"!),it is surprising that only three notable biographies on him exist. This one is by a man who knew Kafka closely for the last half of his life.When they met Kafka was 19, he died one month short of his 41st birthday.The author's reverence makes the reader become passionately attached to the subjects of Kafka's inner feelings; his reserved,taciturn approach to people, his obsession with pure thoughts, his sensitivity to noise, his devotion to the the earth,its humans,animals and plants. Even now, three quarters of a century later, the reader feels the exasperation, the frustration, the torment Kafka suffered under his materialistic, social climbing father who dominated and eventually ruined his son. The book cannot be called lively,Kafka's lifestyle was not frolicsome. However, it is never dull. His clandestine trysts with the sleazier side of Prague nightlife takes the reader by surprise.Then comes Brod's stunner of a revelation only unearthed in 1948, twenty-four years after Kafka's death.??? The last quarter of the book is the best.Intense and sorrowful, just as Kafka would have wanted it. For those looking for the intellectual side of Kafka the book offers insights into his appreciation of Goethe (his idol),Thomas Mann, Flaubert and Dickens, among many others. Brod's ace is his ability to quote the sensitive Kafka; viewing the fish at a Berlin aquarium after Kafka became an ardent vegetarian he is quoted, "Now I can at last look at you in peace,I don't eat you anymore". Also his reverence for all life as when a nurse placed flowers near his deathbed," One must take care that the lowest flowers over there, where they have been crushed into the vases, don't suffer. How can one do that? Perhaps bowls are really the best." And then the "humorous" Kafka on hearing that he had TB," My head has made an appointment with my lungs behind my back." When Kafka died tragically young he joined the likes of the Romantics Byron (36),Shelley (29) and Keats (25) as a group who had dedicated their lives to the betterment of mankind and had all died when life should have just been beginning. As with the Romantics,one is left wondering what Kafka would have achieved given another forty years. One will never know, but for an interesting observation of his 40 years,"Franz Kafka-A Biography" is the book.

"A Country Doctor" is one of Kafkas most masterful displays of the written word to date. No, doctors don't have it easy and we get a first hand account of "how it really is" from this amazing book. Kafka strips the scrubs and exhibits the doctors body in detail, describing how the doctor operates and reacts to troublesome patients. The A-septic method never struck me as being anything more than a method until now. Buy it, read it and don't forget to wipe.

I thought the book was great and I'd like to preview it

this book is out of print. i have a copy in good condition.

Canetti presents a readable overview of Kafka's intense correspondence with Felice Bauer, providing a rough biographical sketch of the author during this turbulent (two abortive engagements to the same woman) yet productive (Metamorphosis, e.g.) time in his life. I don't think Canetti succeeded in proving his notion that Kafka's landmark novel The Trial is a fictionalized representation of his oddly doomed relationship with Felice, but he does point out several interesting parallels which can enhance your enjoyment of Joseph K's misadventures. The real value of Canetti's book is, in my opinion, the fact that it will probably inspire you to read Kafka's own diaries and the actual letters to Felice themselves, and probably with a greater appreciation as well.

A mi punto de vista, el personaje principal, era el que mantenia su casa en un trabajo en el cual lo explotaban todos, pero un dia,al sufrir un cambio y convertirse en un tipo de insecto, su familia y "amigos" lo empiezan a despreciar, por su apariencia y porque ya no era util para ellos...al grado de que lo evitan la mayor parte del tiempo, dicha aberracion que sienten sobre el llega tambien a que el sea insultado y golpeado.

Creo que es una manera de ver, que no importa quien seas, si no pueden sacarte algun provecho, dejaran de apreciarte.

This was my first exposure to Kafka, and was actually in audiobook form, with a masterful narration by George Guidall. It was a very well-rounded collection, including The Metamorphosis, The Stoker, A Country Doctor, and Visit to a Penal Colony.

I won't pretend that I understood all of the political/religious symbolism, but was captivated by the dark humor and weird, despairing ambience of these character studies. There isn't a lot of conventional dramatic movement, but the power of these surreal images and bizarre viewpoints sneaks up on you. Kakfa has a narrative voice that is utterly unique. I found that it gained power upon re-reading(hearing), and promptly loaded up cassette one as soon as I reached the end.

I remember purchasing this 800-page monster with queasy forebodings. Its mere existence seemed an affront to the exemplary scholarship of Ernst Pawel and Ronald Hayman, as if the world of Kafka studies secretly desired Karl to take things up a notch with a "definitive" biographical study (if a definitional text can be so defined by sheer length and breadth).

Nevertheless, I identify very strongly with what Karl is trying to do here - not so much the overzealous attempt to crossbreed biographical narrative with academic criticism, but rather the bodying forth of an unmanageable style and rollicking critical panache (my own affliction), a work of epic design and hubris that, given its tortuous subject, is almost destined to flop. Karl wants more than anything to be a critical uber-stylist (me again), an innovatory and polyphonic commentator on this most shadowy of literary personae, yet throughout the 200+ hours I've devoted to his book, I can't help feeling that I've gotten no closer to the heart of Kafka's universe than K. the Land-Surveyor got to the crow-infested central tower of his Castle.

Franz Kafka, the 20th-century author whom I love and revere above all others, deserves a biographer as ferociously dedicated and metaphysically haunted as his subject. Karl's book, at its worst, is a muddled implosion of rehashed ideas and marginally original insights. There are too many dead spots, too many lazy correspondences and simpering cliches, too much recycled exegesis piddling alongside desperate attempts at ingenuity (Kafka's obsession with orality and digestion, the hyper-mastication of food, his hypochondriac obsessions, are touched upon at least once per thirty pages!).

There are some gratifying moments as well, however. Karl's reading of "The Village Schoolmaster" as a meditation on the vagaries of (dis)information, the iniquities imbedded in the lives of "quiet old people," and on culture's propensity to transmogrify "the 'truth' with all the possibilities that transform every event into something false"(512), is criticism at its strongest. Karl also hits a high note with his chapter on Kafka's great epistolary novel, *The Letters to Felice*, working through the byzantine evasions and cruelly manipulative mind-games Kafka subjected his great love (and bitter nemesis), the unsuspecting secretary Felice Bauer, who was willing to forgive him his schizoid hysterics, so long as he settled into his ordained role as husband and provider. It was one of Kafka's most fruitful "literary" experiments, excruciating from beginning to end, and amply expounded by Karl in a 110-page chapter. "Kafka is our poet of ordinary madness," Karl brilliantly notes, and does his best to limn the preceding century as a magnificently horrifying Kafkan Event, the world becoming so "when it relocates the individual in areas he or she could not have preconceived; when it redefines the terms of existence in unforeseen modes; when it resuscitates the terms of life in ironies and paradoxes that run askew to human will or purpose"(759). I'll leave it to the individual reader to decide whether this sentiment is ingenious, trite, simplistic, or merely vague. It is, I would say, fairly representative of this scholar's rhetorical style and comportment.

Sadly, Karl is unable to sustain the above level of adroitness throughout this marathon of a treatise, and all but flounders when it comes to analyzing Kafka's subtler and more elusive efforts. His dismissal of "The Hunter Gracchus" as "not [a] major work," for example, is simply too much to take. His similar shrugging-off of Deleuze and Guattari's pathbreaking *Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature*(1975), is another in a wide range of disappointments the reader must slog through.

Nevertheless, Karl's book has some great insights on specific texts and events. Beneath all the pandering hubris there *is* a semi-coherent narrative of Kafka's life, his relationships with women (transmuted into the cloying eroto-doppelgangers of *The Trial* and *The Castle*), the claustrophobic pressure-chamber of the Kafka household, the humiliations of his professional life, his patronage of the Yiddish theater, his Zionist aspirations, his readings of classic literature (Goethe, Flaubert, Kleist, and Dostoyevsky above all), and so on....

Perhaps my problem is that I just have a very personal and decisive idea of who and what Kafka is, an image I am driven to safeguard at all costs, against all intercessors. Maybe Karl (whose George Eliot biography I much prefer) isn't the obnoxious hack he makes himself out to be in these circular and overwritten pages. Or perhaps this book is meant to be read through relatively quickly, rather than pored over obsessively (as is my habit), stripping every sentence of its rhythm and panache. That said, I urge the potential reader to try and prove me wrong.

This is an enormous book, in more ways than one. At 810 pages, there is lots of material here, and events or issues are often brought up in more than one place, giving you a curious sense of having read something before. But this is to some extent an inevitable product of the subject: Kafka's life and literature are full of complex intersections of thoughts, feelings, obsessions, issues, events, relationships, etc., and Karl's densely woven narrative preserves and illuminates all this rather than smoothing it out. His discussion of Kafka's odd, intense, anxiety-filled connection with Felice Bauer is especially good: he dissects all the parries and ripostes of this ultimately pointless relationship, seeing them as reflecting Kafka's desperate need to plumb the depths of his own psychology through his impossible need for her (much more insightful than Elias Canetti's book on the subject). True, the book is massive and sometimes untidy, but for those who love Kafka, it is a uniquely penetrating read.

This is an interesting picto-biography of Kafka replete with a lot of good, informative and well-printed photographs and solid information about Kafka's life and writing. There is also a wealth of background information on Prague as the "Eastern center" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There is no index, but the bibliography is thoughtful and well-rounded. The text is pretty pedestrian actually, and the excerpts from Kafka's letters and diaries seem a bit lacking. The layout is odd, too, and the book suffers greatly from a rash of bad hyphenation which impedes readability.