Conversations with Kafka 2e: 1217 (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Janouch, Gustav; Prose, Francine; Kalman, Maira; Rees, Goronwy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081121950X ISBN 13: 9780811219501

Publisher: New Directions, 2012

Synopsis

Gustav Janouch met Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of The Metamorphosis, as a seventeen-year-old fledgling poet. As Francine Prose notes in her wonderful preface, "they fell into the habit of taking long strolls through the city, strolls on which Kafka seems to have said many amazing, incisive, literary, and per- things to his companion and interlocutor, the teenage Boswell of Prague. Crossing a windswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch, 'Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one's personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.'"

They talk about writing (Kafka's own, but also that of his favorite writers: Poe, Kleist, and Rimbaud, who "transforms vowels into colors") as well as technology, film, crime, Darwinism, Chinese philosophy, carpentry, insomnia, street fights, Hindu scripture, art, suicide, and prayer. "Prayer," Kafka notes, brings "its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one's own existence."

About this title

About the Authors

Gustav Janouch (1903-1968) was a young poet whose father worked at the same insurance company as Kafka. A certain amount of controversy has been aroused by his Conversations with Kafka: some have been skeptical that any human being can talk the way Kafka does in this book, but both Max Brod and Dora Diamant considered it authentic.

Born in Brooklyn, Francine Prose has published fourteen novels. The Washington Post has called her work a "sheer delight."

Goronwy Rees (1909 -1979) was a Welsh journalist, academic, translator and writer.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081121950X
• ISBN 13: 9780811219501
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 228