Product Description

It is likely that these journals will be regarded as one of [Kafka's] major literary works; his life and personality were perfectly suited to the diary form, and in these pages he reveals what he customarily hid from the world." -- New Yorker

"What seems to hold [the diaries] together is a kind of ruthless honesty and self-awareness." -- New York Times

Though Franz Kafka is one of the greatest and most widely read and discussed authors of the twentieth century, and continues to be a tremendous influence on artists of our time, he remains an elusive figure, his life and work open to endless interpretation.

These diaries reveal the essential Kafka behind the enigmatic artist. Covering the period from 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka's death at the age of forty, they provide a penetrating look into Kafka's world -- notes on life in Prague, accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and for the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt and of being an outcast, and his struggles and triumphs in expressing himself as a writer.

Now, for the first time in this country, the complete diaries of Franz Kafka are available in one volume. They are not only indispensable to an understanding of Kafka the man and the artist, but are a compulsively readable, haunting account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80399 in Books
• Published on: 1988-10-30
• Released on: 1988-10-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)

Inside Flap Copy
It is likely that these journals will be regarded as one of [Kafka's] major literary works; his life and personality were perfectly suited to the diary form, and in these pages he reveals what he customarily hid from the world." -- New Yorker

"What seems to hold [the diaries] together is a kind of ruthless honesty and self-awareness." -- New York Times

Though Franz Kafka is one of the greatest and most widely read and discussed authors of the twentieth century, and continues to be a tremendous influence on artists of our time, he remains an elusive figure, his life and work open to endless interpretation.

These diaries reveal the essential Kafka behind the enigmatic artist. Covering the period from 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka's death at the age of forty, they provide a penetrating look into Kafka's world -- notes on life in Prague, accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and for the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt and of being an outcast, and his struggles and triumphs in expressing himself as a writer.

Now, for the first time in this country, the complete diaries of Franz Kafka are available in one volume. They are not only indispensable to an understanding of Kafka the man and the artist, but are a compulsively readable, haunting account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.

Customer Reviews

Comic masterpiece
Yes, yes, I know it's odd to describe Kafka's writing as comic, but he really was one of the funniest writers of the Twentieth Century. His outlook on life reminds me so much of Charlie Chaplin's famous mantra that life is a tragedy in close up, in long shot it's a comedy. Kafka is loved by millions because he is the most universal writer of them all. High on the peaks of Twentieth Century literature features the brilliant stylistic prose of Nabokov, the pyrotechnics of Joyce, the pitch black comedy of Beckett, the sublime little observations of Proust. But right at the summit sits the unlikely figure of the wretched, kvetching tortured sick soul and body of Kafka, the world's greatest underdog. With these diaries chronicling his dreams, his awareness of the fragility of his physical body, his anguished relations with his family and friends, the daily nightmare of his office job and the time it stole from his creative pursuits, Kafka speaks for us all. For instance, a single paragraph sentence from 1913 reads:

I'll shut myself off from everyone to the point of insensibility. Make an enemy of everyone, speak to no one.

Now anyone who has ever been a teenager will feel a burning empathy with that sentiment!

Then some bits are brilliantly, nightmarishly extraordinary, like this musing, also from 1913:

To be pulled in through the ground-floor window of a house by a rope tied around one's neck and to be yanked up, bloody and ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics, without consideration, as if by a person who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last fragments of me when it breaks through the roof tiles, is seen on the roof

I read this part on a train, and snorted with laughter. Kafka is such a lovable tortured genius, carrying the weight of his misery around like an anvil on his back. Such a warped brilliant imagination.

Keep a copy of these diaries on your bedside table for those moments when you are fed up with the wretched pressures of the world, can't stand other people, and want to selfishly wallow like a pig in the mud of your own self pity. Priceless.

A Writer's Writer
Franz Kafka's diaries were never meant to be published. Yet his diaries are spread across the internet, the actual published diaries translated into many languages and countless printings. These dairies are very personal, and the gentle Prague Jew would certainly be appalled.

Why do we continue to find these writings so fascinating?

Well, simply, they're terribly honest. Kafka never meant for these diary entries to be published, let alone read by another person. For those interested in the mechanics and soul of writing, Kafka's diaries are a source of true wonder. A confessional of a gentle soul, a man trapped in an insurance job, staying up through the night writing his heart-out, his thoughts, pains and acute observations of a time on the brink of great and terrible change, the death and cruelty of two world wars.

When reading Kafka, there is an overwhelming darkness, loneliness, a strong shadow that continually hovered around him, a "something" he tried to rid himself of through intense self reflection, which the reader of these diaries will discover.

Kafka's life story is, for the most part, a tragedy. A painful experience as one, sometimes, can feel his self consciousness, that subtle pain at the back of the neck, when, you know, you're being stared at...and his continued bad health.

I've attempted to read Kafka's diaries many times, and only now, for some reason, can withstand the pain of his perceptions, his precarious relationship with his father, and the few women he loved and the true love he never married.

Kafka is a man that loved writing for writing's sake, an artist who experimented daily, till dawn most nights, to pick up his little brief case and begin his work as an insurance lawyer in a semi-official insurance institute.

A strange yet moving entry:

21 February 1911
I live my life here as if I were entirely certain of a second life, as if for example I had entirely gotten over the failed time spent in Paris, since I will strive to return soon. Connected to this, the sight of the sharply divided light and shadow on the street paving.
For a moment I felt myself covered in armour.
How distant, for example, are the muscles of my arms

Kafka's writing was for the act itself without pretension or grandious dreams, (though his success during his 40 year lifetime was no disappointment) an act of instinct, pure and natural. Kafka is the true writer's writer.

The Indispensable Kafka
Franz Kafka's 1910-23 diary entries are essential reading for anyone who seeks a better understanding of the author's literary world. This 1988 printing contains all the surviving Kafka diaries in one comprehensive volume. More revelatory than any biography, the diaries remain as compelling as his fictional work.