UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · HISTORY AND CRITICISM · CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION
Erich Heller
The bare facts of Franz Kafka's life seem ordinary, even banal.
— from Kafka, 2006
Most acclaimed
Franz Kafka
Looks at such major aspects of the author's life as family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair, and argues that, when reinserted in Kafka's letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of "sainthood" frequently attached to him. "Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence -- in his many letters, in his extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating book investigates some of the sources of Kafka's personal anguish and its complex reflections in his imaginary world. In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafka's life (family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair) that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafka's dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafka's closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the author's novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafka's letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of "sainthood" frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality." -- Publisher's description.
Kafka
2006
"In Kafka's writing, Albert Camus tells us, we travel "to the limits of human thought." And in this book, the world's leading Kafka authority conducts us to the deepest reaches of Kafka's own troubled psyche, to reveal the inner workings of the man who gave his name to a central facet of modern experience, the Kafkaesque. Klaus Wagenbach, who wrote the first major critical biography of Kafka, draws upon a wealth of new and recent information to produce a concise but finely nuanced portrait of the author, an ideal introduction to this quintessential figure of modernity." "With extensive reference to Kafka's extraordinary letters and diaries, Wagenbach shows us the author of Metamorphosis and The Trial perpetually caught between the irresistible attractions of the world and his ruthless desire for solitude and isolation. It was this tension, Wagenbach tells us, that gave Kafka's writing its uncanny quality and that haunted his intense, unresolved relationships with women. And it was in this tension that both his misery and mastery inhered, making his one of the most painfully powerful voices of the experience of the twentieth century."--Jacket.
Thomas Mann
1967
Thomas Mann is a literary biography in the grand tradition by the acclaimed biographer of Proust, Sartre, and Kafka. Ronald Hayman offers the first complete portrait in English of the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, and the first to draw on Mann's unexpurgated diaries. Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and Joseph and His Brothers, was a man with secrets. Ronald Hayman uncovers a brilliant writer's masks and brings to the fore the private man: his bisexuality, his obsession with "keeping up appearances," and the deep guilt feelings that plagued him for nearly fifty years. Hayman is the first biographer to show the extent to which Mann presented a sanitized self-portrait in his novels, stories, essays, photographs, public appearances, broadcasts, and articles. The world took Mann to be a self-controlled, elegant, dignified, supremely self-assured, rather aloof man. Wanting this image to survive his death, Mann incinerated most of his diaries and stipulated that the five thousand manuscript pages he had spared should be kept under seal for twenty years after his death. In reality, as these newly available diaries attest, Mann was subject to fits of nervous trembling, convulsive sobbing, and moments of sexual embarrassment. ("It can scarcely be impotence," he recorded in 1920. "How would it be if there were a young man at my disposal?") When his novels are reread in the perspective of the diaries, new meanings emerge, as do new interconnections between the problems of the characters and those of the author. As Hayman demonstrates in vivid and illuminating detail, Mann overcame literary inhibitions by speaking freely about his inner life through fictional characters apparently dissimilar to himself. As Mann once wrote to a friend, his trick was to find "novelistic forms and masks which can be displayed in public as a means of relaying my love, my hatred, my sympathy, my contempt, my pride, my scorn and the accusations I want to make.". Drawing on extensive research, including not only the as-yet-unpublished final volumes of Mann's diaries but also new interviews with Mann's children, Ronald Hayman moves behind Mann's public persona to bring forth startling reinterpretations of his novels, stories, and criticism, and to reveal an extraordinarily complex and often misunderstood genius.