Written by John Winters   

In 2006, German author and editor Reiner Stach told an American reporter there was no definitive biography of Franz Kafka.

Actually, there is. And he’s written it.

My favorite book of 2013 is actually two books, and they technically aren’t even new. They are the second and third parts of Stach’s trilogy on the life of Franz Kafka, and thanks to excellent translations by Shelley Frisch, they are now available in English from Princeton University Press.

“Kafka: The Decisive Years” is the middle volume, covering the author’s most productive years, 1910 to 1915. Drawing on a decade’s worth of research and more than 4,000 pages of letters, diaries, journals and other sources, Stach takes us through the writing of “The Trial” and “The Metamorphosis,” as well as Kafka’s troubled relationship with Felice Bauer and the outbreak of World War I.

“Kafka: The Years of Insight” caps the trilogy, and covers the writer’s life from 1916 to his death in 1924, and the disintegration of Kafka’s world into an existence marked by isolation, perceived failures, illness and misery on several fronts. (This year will see the publication of the translated first volume, covering Kafka’s youth.)

These are big books. The middle volume runs to 581 pages in paperback, the final one goes 100 more. It might seem a lot for an author who died at age 40 and whose official output is less than a dozen completed stories and three incomplete novels. However, if ever there was a writer one could call singular, Kafka is it. His spellbinding stories bespeak alienation, the brutality of the modern world and the irrationality of life itself. Meanwhile, his style is enigmatic and marked by a remarkable precision of language, ideas and images. Kafka’s influence on other writers and world culture cannot be overstated.

Kafka the man was as confounding as he was brilliant. In the central volume of his trilogy, Stach takes us, blow by blow, through his relationship with Bauer. It is long and drawn out, but it paints perhaps the most detailed picture of Kafka’s inner life. The back-and-forth of this relationship occupies a good deal of “The Decisive Years,” leading Stach to conclude: “It was the transition from the flight of the imagination to the drudgery of reality that was so difficult for Kafka…” Kafka dreaded the idea of marriage, fearing it would rob him of the time necessary to write. As he once put it to his friend and literary executor, Max Brod: “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

This volume also details Kafka’s struggle to find his voice and his writerly sense of confidence, and finally begin to achieve some small literary successes.

When he begins coughing up blood early in the final volume, and the post-war years, more failed romances, the famous “Letter to His Father,” and sinking fortunes begin to break him down, Kafka’s psychology and relationship to reality is brought into even sharper focus. Stach makes the point that Kafka created a personal mythology in order to both survive this world and to be able to write. Kafka self-consciously fed off Kierkegaard, who wrote in his diary: “As soon as a man comes along… who says: ‘However the world is, I shall stay with my original nature, which I am not about to change to suit what the world regards as good…’” This sense of Otherness shielded Kafka, and when disease strikes, he incorporates it into the myth, almost welcoming the freedom it gives him from the trivial aspects of life.

All of this is contextualized wonderfully by Stach, be it the Prague of the early 20 century, the Zionist movement, the mores of the time, the privations of the war years, the literary scenes of Prague and Berlin, or the world of tubercular sufferers. Stach’s analysis is careful and always rooted in the facts of the life, or Kafka’s letters and diary, and only occasionally drawn from the stories and novels. The writing is erudite, but not overly so, making these books both entertaining and enlightening for the expert and lay person alike. And it deserves mentioning again, Stach hit the lottery with a translator as fine as Frisch.

When I asked myself what book I most enjoyed reading the past year, these two volumes on Kafka kept leaping to the fore. They are as close to flawless as more than 1,200 pages on this most challenging of writers can be.

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