Kafka

'When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect ...' So begins Franz Kafka's most famous story Metamorphosis.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is among the most intriguing and influential writers of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published only a handful of short stories, the best known being The Transformation. All three of his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and The Man Who Disappeared [America], were published after his death and helped to found Kafka's reputation as a uniquely perceptive interpreter of the twentieth
century.

Kafka's fiction vividly evokes bizarre situations: a commercial traveller is turned into an insect, a banker is arrested by a mysterious court, a fasting artist starves to death in the name of art, a singing mouse becomes the heroine of her nation. Attending both to Kafka's crisis-ridden life and to the subtleties of his art, Ritchie Robertson shows how his work explores such characteristically modern themes as the place of the body in culture, the power of institutions over people, and the
possibility of religion after Nietzsche had proclaimed 'the death of God'. The result is an up-to-date and accessible portrait of a fascinating author which shows us ways to read and make sense of his perplexing and absorbing work. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Synopsis
This is one title in a series of short, illustrated biographies suitab le for students and the general reader. They tell the stories of those who have shaped our present and our past, from Beethoven to Dietrich, and from Einstein to Churchill. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) gave his name to a central facet of modern experience - the "Kafkaesque" - and created some of the most memorable images in 20th-century literature. This biography quotes extensively from Kafka's letters and diaries to dig deep into his troubled psyche. The author of "Metamorphosis" and "The Trial" is best understood, it argues, in terms of an inner tension between the attractions of the world and his ruthless desire for solitude and isolation. It was this tension that gave his writing its uncanny quality and that haunted his intense, unresolved relationships with women. The result was writing which, according to Albert Camus, takes us "to the limits of human thought".