America's History 6th Ed Vol 1 + Maps in Context Vol 1 Book

I have once more reached the conclusion of K a Biography of Kafka by Ronald Hayman. The book is a scrupulous analysis of a life lived in places where identities are hard to determine and where there is always a sense of displacement, for Kafka grew up in Prague then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - a German speaking Czech Jew. Czech nationalism was always bubbling beneath the surface - and suspicion and prejudice were rife directed both at Jews and German speakers. This cauldron of enmities and threatening presences was made more menacing to the sensitive Kafka by his father a strong and dominating personality who found commercial success in running a hardware shop.
These were the dynamics at work in Kafka's fevered imagination. Hayman's book certainly made me wish to turn once more to the haunting stories and novels. The book skilfully interweaves the gestation of the works with the circumstances and conflicts from which they appear to derive. Throughout this life there is a fear of parental disapproval and scorn and a guilt arising from this fear. There are fraught relationships with women characterised by a deep need for company and acceptance in constant terrifying interplay with a struggle for personal and creative freedom. Tumultuous dramas play out in the tempestuous letters to Felice Bauer and later to Milena, a translator of his work, whose personal circumstances (she is married) provide further insurmountable obstacles to add to those self-inflicted torments that suffocate his yearnings for love.
It would be wrong though to view the life purely as some desperate melodrama exploding from the darkness of a damaged psyche for Kafka always attracted friends. He had natural gifts for warmth and playfulness and a capacity for selflessness in his obvious devotion and care for others. This manifests itself in his relationship with his sister Ottla, he appears caring about her future and lives contentedly with her at various times. His working life at the insurance office is characterised by professionalism and innate ability. There is evidence of stability and strength which maybe only illness, family circumstances and the unforgiving tides of history swept from his grasp. Hayman explores all these contradictory impulses and differing perspectives, building a rich and subtle portrait. I remember particularly the tender vignette provided by his office cleaner who tidies his workspace following his retirement - on his desk "the slender glass vase holding two pencils and a penholder, the blue and gold teacup and saucer he used for drinking milk and sometimes tea". This is an intensely human portrait. We can get close to the author, see beyond the disordered consciousness, the fevered brain and encounter the man that might have lived in kinder times - an imagination whose flowering fell early on the stony ground of a cruel fate. The major stories and novels are placed amid the chronology of his short life. We can see them shaped by personal and wider historical circumstances.
The biography itself reads like drama at key moments as in the opening pages, Hayman shows the writing of the story, Das Urteil (The Judgement) - confronting us with the feared father in both art and life, and then again in the closing scenes a tender romance develops between the dying author and Dora Dymant and vividly Hayman shows the tableau at the grave, a prostrate Dora and the figure of Kafka's troubled father turning coldly away from these tears.
This biography is as much a lived experience as a considered exposition of a complex and disturbing life. It is worth much more than a second reading.