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“... cheap Parker pens.’Children are mostly wrong, but also superior to us. Reading Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Early Years, I found myself thinking often of Sendak. Maybe this is only because I read too many children’s books too many times, and such rereading makes Kabbalah from anything. Or maybe, more tendentiously, because Sendak and ...”

“... appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and sub-genres: the Chester-Belloc style of essay writing is ...”

“... guilty community and fictions of innocence, and from there to the austere lessons of the work of Franz Kafka. Then comes a section on Shakespeare, including major essays on The Merchant of Venice and Othello. The move to the animal worlds of Lawrence and Moore is prompted by the inhuman (or all too human) curiosity of Iago about the evil he can do for ...”

“... and then it came to me. I jotted down the book proposal on a napkin. Provisional title: My Friend Franz: Chronicle of a Life Not a Little Kafkaesque. Chapter 1: Age 13. Read ‘The Metamorphosis’ – own body undergoing changes never anticipated. Develop a passionate interest in entomology. Crippling phobia about apples. Chapter 2: At university I read ...”

“... those contacts failed him and he experienced the desolation of his self-chosen exile. He never met Franz Kafka, his contemporary and fellow-countryman, who is often seen as the patron saint of modern alienation. But even Kafka can hardly have felt more solitary than Rilke, the stateless ‘German’, the contents of his ...”

“... detail and ordinary humanity we are now able to see Stevens’s colleague in the insurance racket Franz Kafka, through the efforts of his biographers Rainer Stach and Klaus Wagenbach. But Mariani seems to have no appetite or aptitude for telling a life story. For all that Stevens tidied everything away in its own little compartment ...”

“... who have been clergymen. T.S. Eliot was a publisher, and as everyone knows Wallace Stevens and Franz Kafka worked for large insurance organisations. To my knowledge, only two writers of importance have been managers of a paint factory: you in Turin, Italy and Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio. Anderson had to flee the paint factory (and his family) to ...”

“... impress us (if, that is, it is one of the very good ones) with the sort of truths that Nietzsche, Kafka and Dostoevsky tell us, or with the truths that Tolstoy and Trollope tell us. To the first kind we respond with amazement and delight, awe even. ‘Of course that’s it! Of course that’s it!’ The second kind of truths are more sober, more laboriously ...”

“... ran his second, Hotel Savoy. It was published in book form by the Schmiede-Verlag, publishers of Kafka and Proust, and he counted it his first novel. He took to the life of a wandering reporter, visiting France and Russia, Poland, Albania and Germany for his papers, and writing them up in long series of articles. He drank, and cultivated a casual grand ...”

“... of Ernest M.’ (whose peculiar complex leads inevitably to his involvement with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and possibly in his assassination) and Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’s Final Case’ (which depends on the discovery that a criminal has been following a route determined by superimposing the outline of a penny farthing bicycle on a map of ...”

“... pomme”).’* Other comparisons include the composer Satie, the painter Rousseau, the inevitable Kafka, and a further trinity of mad writers, Hölderlin, Nerval and Christopher Smart. The more genial and indeed congenial William Gass describes Walser more modestly: ‘He was a kind of columnist before the time of columns.’ And a further, more modest name ...”

“... in internal collective consciousness between the age of Moses Mendelssohn and that of Freud, Kafka, Rosenzweig and Buber? How would he interpret the haskalah (Hebrew enlightenment), the rise of Reform and Liberal Judaisms, the Neolog (quasi-reformist) Jews in Hungary, neo-orthodoxy, the Musar movement, and the hundred and one other prisms through which ...”

“... critical debate. East German writers like Arnold Zweig and Anna Seghers, Stephan Hermlin and Franz Fühmann began to be treated seriously, and the literature of the German Democratic Republic was increasingly recognised as a challenging alternative to the traditions of the West. An even more sensitive frontier is explored in Reich-Ranicki’s study of ...”

“... a scientific aptitude, his imagination quite apart: Max Brod recounts that he was staggered at Franz Kafka’s detailed report on a football match they had seen together; Kafka had suggested that they should try and see who could remember more, minute details included. No wonder mass communication is a grave problem ...”

“... over every sentence, season after season, year after year, novel after novel, a photograph of Franz Kafka hanging on the wall like a religious icon and haunting admonition. So sacrosanct was Roth’s Fortress of Solitude that he once returned a pair of kittens because their frolics were too distracting – he needed every ounce of sniper focus to ...”