Kafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach review – a triumph of literary scholarship

The second volume of a masterly biography covers the end of Kafka’s relationship with Felice Bauer and the writing of The Castle

This is the second volume of Reiner Stach’s masterly trilogy on Kafka, expertly translated from German by Shelley Frisch. The first covered the years 1910 to 1915 and this one focuses on Kafka’s later life: the end of his relationship with Felice Bauer; the haven he found in Old Prague’s Alchemistengasse, where he wrote such remarkable stories as “A Country Doctor”; the diagnosis in August 1917 of the tuberculosis from which he would die seven years later; the writing of Letter to His Father in 1919, “a core text of literary modernity”; his relationships with Milena and Dora; and in 1922, Kafka’s third attempt to write a novel, The Castle, in which he once again sought “the strange, mysterious, possibly dangerous, possibly redemptive comfort of writing”. In his diary, Kafka noted: “I am memory come alive.” Stach’s great achievement is to place the literary work into a biographical context that emphasises the complex interplay of memory, experience and symbolism in the writing. As he puts it, Kafka was constantly “zigzagging between word and world”. A triumph of biography and literary scholarship.

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