As Lonely as Franz Kafka

by Marthe Robert

Book Overview

Book by Marthe Robert This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151090580
• ISBN13: 9780151090587
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
• Length: 251 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An original and insightful study

Marthe Robert Kafka 's principal translator into French has written an original and insightful study of his work. She calls it a ' psychological biography' Its chapters are: The Censored Name, the Identity Crisis, the Road Back, the Thorbush, Before the Law, Escape , Fiction and Reality. Here is a small sample of her analysis"If one attempts to deal with him from the standpoint of a theologician, of a philosopher, of even of a literary critic, it turns out that Kafka is never where the concepts want him tobe; he never quite corresponds to one's view of his interests and aims, especially not in the realm , so inadequately described, of his relations with Judaism and the Jews, where every writer tends to appropriate him according to the writer's own requirements. Assimilated Jew, anti- Jewish Jew, anti- Zionist, Zionist, believer, atheist- Kafka was indeed all of these at different times in his development, sometimes all at once( he wrote Investigations of a Dog in 1922 at a time when he had almost become a militant Zionist) but none of these characteizations throw the least light on the underlying reasons for his struggle , or the form it took, or explains how it was possible for the pathological indecision of a constantly torn man to give rise to the most rigorous modern art, the only art, perhaps in which modernity and rigor have really been combined. " p.27 One more point . In her first chapter Robert connects Kafka's hiding , censoring of his name not only with his Jewish identity but with the Biblical prohibition of writing the Divine Name, of spelling it out explicitly. This is the kind of suggestive insight that makes this work a valuable one.