Is That Kafka?: 99 Finds

Reiner Stach has written a three-volume literary biography of Franz Kafka, which I understand is now the leading Kafka biography. In the course of his research into Kafka's life, Stach assembled many tidbits that, as he writes, "display him in unexpected lights [and] allow us to hear rarely detected undertones and overtones." Stach presents these 99 tidbits as "Finds". Taken together, they humanize Kafka and demonstrate (in the words of his friend Georg Langer) that he was "an absolutely original person" and an "exceptional personality". The 99 Finds are an eclectic collection. They are presented in short pieces or vignettes, ranging from one to five pages. Many contain historical photographs or facsimiles of Kafka's handwriting or sketches. Most are based on an extract from Kafka's letters, diaries, or writings, or from the letters or memoirs of others. And for most, Stach provides brief explanation and context. Perhaps a few examples will be helpful. Find #9 is entitled "Kafka Drinks Beer". It contains about a dozen excerpts from letters and diaries relating to Kafka drinking beer and how, in the final weeks of his life, he became a "passionate drinker". Stach explains that in those last weeks, "because of his laryngeal tuberculosis, Kafka could only take tiny, painful swallows, and so he suffered from constant thirst." Relevant to Kafka's tuberculosis, another Find (#27) contains about a dozen excerpts relating to Kafka's somewhat skeptical but tolerant attitude towards the doctors who long labored to restore him to relative health. One Find deals with Kafka's occasional visits to brothels. It includes a touching photograph of Kafka and a wine bar waitress ("one of his unfortunate flings"). Stach writes, "For Kafka, as for most bourgeois men of his day, visiting prostitutes was more a hygienic problem than a moral one." Find #82 is a letter from a doctor to Kafka, asking him to explain "Metamorphosis", so that the doctor could in turn explain it to his family. A handful of Finds contain examples of Kafka's prose from letters or his notebooks; they all are of the same transcendent quality as his published works, and some display a whimsical humor not commonly associated with Kafka. The last Find is the obituary that Milena Jesensk· (with whom Kafka had had a brief passionate affair) wrote for the Czech language newspaper in Prague two days after Kafka had died in a sanatorium outside Vienna. It is both insightful and very touching. The question "Is that Kafka?" comes from two other Finds, both of them photographs of crowd scenes in which it has been suggested, plausibly, that one of the blurry figures is Kafka. (One of the photographs is from an air show in northern Italy in 1909; the other of a political rally from 1920 in the South Tyrol, where Kafka was staying in an effort to alleviate his lung infection.) The book first appeared in German in 2012. Kurt Beals is denoted as the translator of this English edition. I assume that Beals is responsible for not only the translation of Stach's commentaries but also the numerous excerpts from Kafka's writings, which translations are superb.