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Franz Kafka is, arguably, the most representative prose writer of the 20th century; his private fantasies and lucidly localized fiction are the universal language of our age. All of us have suffered many of Kafka's wounds: primitive conflicts between parents and children; furtive sadism; faceless boredom; obscene collaboration between victim and torturer; self-reduction to a sense of nullity; helpless hunger at the feast of life; baffling tyranny; spiritual solitude in a loveless world; the defeat of the self by the self; and, above all, that shudder of metaphysical dread for which despair may be too tame a term.
Moreover, Kafka is a severely neurotic artist whose sensibility is lacerated with irrational anxieties, morbid drives, paranoia, hysteria and a relentless insistence on merciless self-punishment. Yet, sick as he surely is, he makes his peace with the world by opening the labyrinth of his work's meanings to the high roads of modern sensibility, to what is most urgent and relevant in our condition. He compels our wonder with his bold fantasy yet scrupulous verisimilitude, his dream-like inventiveness and unique key of superior logic, and above all with a prose style that is as lean and firm and clean as Voltaire's.
Most relevantly, Kafka is our man because his life was one unending crisis, and though he died of laryngeal tuberculosis at 41, an age suitable for a mid-life crisis, he also suffered a particularly significant crisis in the midst of his truncated maturity. At the age of 29 he met a Jewish girl from Berlin, Felice Bauer, and within