Sitting up now, I flipped through and read selections from his diaries into the phone. According to Kafka’s friend and biographer Max Brod, at the time of his death Kafka was working on his short story, “A Hunger Artist,” about a man whose art form is starvation-one of the grimmest Kafka analogues, in a very competitive field. He had been living with tuberculosis for nearly seven years, and by summer 1924 the state of his throat had made it too painful to eat or drink, sentencing him to death by starvation. Kafka died on June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium outside Vienna, a month shy of his 41st birthday. I took a Kafka seminar one semester, and thought the Diaries might make an enlightening companion piece. ) I’d picked it up at the Book Barn, a rambling used bookstore in Niantic, CT, a short drive from my campus apartment. (The diaries also exist online in the unabridged original German, from the comprehensive Kafka Project. The text was translated by Martin Greenberg with the aid of Hannah Arendt, of all people. Published in English by Schocken Books, now a Knopf imprint specializing in Jewish literature-my Diaries is a third printing, from 1971. Sprawled across my bed, I stared idly at the bookshelf and pulled down a beat-up volume I’d had since college, when my friend and I had shared a microwave: The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923. He was cramming for an exam so hadn’t had much time, and I’d just finished the most recent of New York’s unspoken book club, when you and every third person on the subway seems to have gotten the same recommendation. Analysing Kafka that way would actually be a really shallow analysis since it's just based on the surface, the form of his writings.One night not long ago, on the phone with a college friend, the conversation turned to what we’d been reading. I can understand why he could be interpreted that way but that would probably be a very loose interpretation of his works. Kafka was some kind of neurotic, had masochistic fantasies, hence the crazy aspect of texts such as the Metamorphosis for example (a metaphor about his family situation actually) but, in short, Kafka had no interest in any fantastic/horrific thematic. Those seemingly horrific metaphors are just coating this unmanageable living/writing thing. It was sheer torture to him to realise litterature and everyday human life were not compatible (knowing of course he couldn't live without writing, you can read a lot about it in his journal) Also, the main theme in his writing is actually his relationship to litterature and his own writing. Kafka is more about the unbearable absurdity of human existence. Kafka is one of my favourite author, and I can see why some would label him a horror writer. Other Subreddits that might interest you: Horror Award Nominees & Winners, 1975-2013
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