Franz Kafka

Working in "the Manchester of the Empire," Kafka proved himself a legal innovator, developing and implementing safety measures and methods of oversight that saved the lives and livelihoods of countless workers. He appealed for the improvement of conditions in quarries, advocated for public assistance to disabled veterans and filed lawsuits against business owners who illegally withheld insurance premiums. And while he complained that the "real hell is there in the office" and, in his epistolary exchanges with friends and lovers, fretted constantly about the obstruction to writing posed by his day job, he also admitted the existence of "the deep-seated bureaucrat" inside him. In technical papers like "On the Examination of Firms by Trade Inspectors" and "Measures for Preventing Accidents From Wood-Planing Machines," he surveyed the strange terrain his literary work would excavate. --Alexander Provan, An Alienation Artist: Kafka and His Critics, The Nation, March 2, 2009, review including of Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, by Franz Kafka, edited by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner (via Arts & Letters Daily)


Recommended reading:
by Franz Kafka at Reading Rat


Criticism (articles, essays, reviews):

Kafka was a lawyer, and his day job was at an insurance company.
...
...insurance company documents, including those that are known to have been written by Kafka, are of a mind-numbing dullness, a characteristic they share with most legal texts on insurance law and its application. --Louis Begley, Before the Law, The New Republic, issue date May 6, 2009, review of Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, edited by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport, The Onion (via Grant Gallicho at dotCommonweal)

If few readers of Kafka can be truly sorry for the existence of the works Kafka had consigned to oblivion, many regret the way [his literary executor Max] Brod chose to present them. --Zadie Smith, F. Kafka, Everyman, The New York Review of Books, July 17, 2008, review of The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, by Louis Begley

Karl’s innocence is the main reason “Amerika” remains less persuasive a parable than “The Trial” and “The Castle.” To be sure, in his first novel Kafka lighted instinctively on many of the techniques he would later use to such great effect. So similar are all three novels in structure and mood that they can be seen as the successively widening turns of a spiral; each time, Kafka surveys the same spiritual territory, but from a more commanding height. --Adam Kirsch, America, ‘Amerika’, The New York Times, January 2, 2009, review of Amerika: The Missing Person, by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann (via Arts & Letters Daily)

No, Kafka won't make it easy for his hagiographers. ... Far from being alone and poor, he lived with his family in upper-middle-class comfort, socialized regularly and was well compensated by his employers at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute. --Louis Bayard, How Kafka-esque is Kafka? Salon, August 1, 2008 review of Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, by James Hawes

Review by Chris Barsanti of Kafka by David Zane Mairowitz, illustrated by Robert Crumb, Bookslut, June 2007

The Human Stain, by John Banville, review of Kafka, by Nicholas Murray, Nation, October 18, 2004

Franz Kafka versus the Novel: 'The Limited Circle Is Pure,' by Zadie Smith, New Republic, November 3, 2003

Kafka's happiness: John Gross reviews Kafka's Last Love, by Kathi Diamant, The Telegraph, October 8, 2003

Kafka Goes to the Movies, by James Poniewozik, New York Times, December 22, 2002

Don't draw the bug! by Martin Greenberg, on The City of K.-–Franz Kafka and Prague, at the Jewish Museum, New Criterion, October 2002

The Hunter Gracchus, by Guy Davenport, on the story & fragment "The Hunter Gracchus" by Franz Kafka, The New Criterion, February 1996