Gallery
In the course of researching his acclaimed three-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Reiner Stach discovered numerous curiosities and idiosyncrasies about the writer that, taken together, complicate the image of Kafka as a tortured neurotic. He loved beer and slapstick. He undertook a fitness regime popularized by a Dutch exercise guru. He tried to cheat on his high-school exams. He used his desk as a metaphor for self-parody and waxed lyrical about the Paris metro. Stach details some of these oddities in Is That Kafka? 99 Finds, first published in Germany in 2012 and forthcoming from New Directions on March 21 in a translation from the German by Kurt Beals. The following two finds are reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Kafka Takes the Subway
The myth of Kafka as an inveterate melancholic has not prepared us for his endearments toward stairs. From this master of self-flagellation we expect only litanies of miseries and maladies. And the diaries do include their share of obligatory despairing. Kafka takes evident pleasure in posturing as an incurable, and he is unfailingly dramatic about minor infirmities. When he has a headache, it is as if he has “two little boards screwed against my temples”; when he cannot sleep, he feels as if he has laid his head “in a false hole.” He was keenly sensitive to sound, and in a short piece later published in a magazine he whines that his bedroom is “the headquarters of the noise of the whole apartment.” His letters have much to say about his phobia of mice. As his biographer Reiner Stach so aptly puts it, “For this man absolutely anything could become a problem.”
