Kafka CL

This is an enormous book, in more ways than one. At 810 pages, there is lots of material here, and events or issues are often brought up in more than one place, giving you a curious sense of having read something before. But this is to some extent an inevitable product of the subject: Kafka's life and literature are full of complex intersections of thoughts, feelings, obsessions, issues, events, relationships, etc., and Karl's densely woven narrative preserves and illuminates all this rather than smoothing it out. His discussion of Kafka's odd, intense, anxiety-filled connection with Felice Bauer is especially good: he dissects all the parries and ripostes of this ultimately pointless relationship, seeing them as reflecting Kafka's desperate need to plumb the depths of his own psychology through his impossible need for her (much more insightful than Elias Canetti's book on the subject). True, the book is massive and sometimes untidy, but for those who love Kafka, it is a uniquely penetrating read.