I Am a Memory Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings

By Franz Kafka

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805204288
• ISBN13: 9780805204285
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: Schocken
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Journals, Letters, Diaries of an Alienated Writer in Prague

From front jacket: "Franz Kafka describes himself as 'a ghost of a vanished age'; yet he was a visionary of a coming era. This is a documentary autobiography of the writer who perhaps more than any other 20th century novelist has captured the imagination of the contemporary reader, and whose name has become synonymous with the condition of our time. The volume presents Kafka's life -- and thought -- using his records and notations in his diaries, letters to friends, family, and his chosen ladies, fragments, aphorisms, and memoirs by others. The reader of Kafka will want to know what kind of man the author was, how he lived, what he cared for, what he was like as a lover. Fortunately, Kafka tells us about his life, though often covertly, and the present volume facilitates a better understanding of that life and its relationship to his work. His life was limited on all sides. The German enclave of Prague imposed narrow confines, especially to an artist; his parents' home was constricting; friends were few; organized culture and religion were uncreative and second hand. To this was added a painfully sensitive physical disposition - insomnia, headaches, early signs of serious illness, and premonitions of death. Though he suffered acutely because of these narrow limits around and within him, Kafka transcended them in his work. His heroes (or antiheroes) partake in the limitless confusion of our age, in the fatal disarray of our vastly expanded space. Out of this life, documented here in his own words, arose his homeless hero living in the terrifying knowledge of his guilt and the author's uncanny view of chaos - indeed, the entire world-view we have come to call Kafkaesque."

The genius revealed Breaking the icy sea within

Kafka's autobiographical writings are central to his life - work. His genius is revealed not only in the novels, stories, parables but in the dairies and the letters. The sense of something uncanny and wonderful may be given in a single line. While reading Kafka is always disturbing the rare beauty of his perceptions too give the sense of the special meaning of great literature. The man who came most alive when he was writing brings the reader to life through his startlingly poetic observations and thoughts.