From Publishers Weekly
The story is well known: the frail, anxiety-ridden young man in Prague who suffers under an overbearing, uncouth father. Every day he trudges off to his boring job at an insurance company. He is drawn to women yet agonizes about every relationship. At night, he writes away but wins scant recognition. He contracts tuberculosis, and his last, truly miserable years are spent in and out of sanatoriums. His final wish is that all his manuscripts be burned, but his best friend violates the request. Within a few years of his death in 1924, Franz Kafka's writings about characters ensnared by the world around them for no apparent reason are recognized as brilliant manifestations of literary modernism. Murray (Bruce Chatwin, etc.) is an experienced biographer and effectively relates Kafka's brief life, trying valiantly to depict a more normal Kafka, a man who lived in society with good friends, enjoyed sex, had wide-ranging intellectual interests and became enamored of Judaism. In Murray's account, Kafka's employer valued him highly, and under the imprint of no less a figure than Kurt Wolff, he experienced some literary success. Despite Murray's best efforts to contain Kafka's idiosyncrasies, though, the writer remains the tormented soul who created out of his personal anxieties and agonies some of the most acclaimed works of the 20th century. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
So intrinsic is Kafka's work to the modern sensibility that its unnerving power has been concentrated into one broadly useful word, Kafkaesque. And so mythologized has his life become, it might seem as though there is nothing left to learn. But as adept biographer Murray (his previous subjects include Aldous Huxley and Bruce Chatwin) proves, Kafka's stunningly fabulistic, emotionally intense, and socially discerning fiction yields new revelations with each reading, and Kafka's cruelly abbreviated life (he died of tuberculosis at 40 in 1924) holds fascinating, heretofore unexamined revelations. Clarifying and companionable, Murray portrays the precocious, hypersensitive, curious, and angst-ridden Kafka as a born artist with a "deep ambivalence toward his family," especially his bullying father, and as a successful executive--Kafka was an industrial risk assessor for a workers' insurance institute, the source of his searing vision of the pitiless aberrations of bureaucracies and factories--who despaired suicidally over having too little time to write. Murray judiciously explicates Kafka's obsessive romantic entanglements, illuminates his savvy navigating of Prague's tricky and anti-Semitic cultural politics, and parses Kafka's influences, particularly his love for Yiddish theater. Kafka's work remains as galvanizing as ever, and now the literary genius himself emerges whole and vital. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“[A] rich new biography.”—John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine



Book Description
The definitive biography of the representative writer of our age

Although Franz Kafka (1883–1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father.

Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka’s German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka’s demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka’s poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka’s story “The Judgement,” about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka’s books--stories suffused with guilt and frustration--derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime.

Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.



About the Author
Nicholas Murray is the author of many books, including biographies of Bruce Chatwin, Matthew Arnold, and Aldous Huxley, a book of poetry, and two novels.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Although Franz Kafka (1883-1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father. Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka's German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka's demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka's poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka's story "The Judgement," about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka's books -- stories suffused with guilt and frustration -- derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime. Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The story is well known: the frail, anxiety-ridden young man in Prague who suffers under an overbearing, uncouth father. Every day he trudges off to his boring job at an insurance company. He is drawn to women yet agonizes about every relationship. At night, he writes away but wins scant recognition. He contracts tuberculosis, and his last, truly miserable years are spent in and out of sanatoriums. His final wish is that all his manuscripts be burned, but his best friend violates the request. Within a few years of his death in 1924, Franz Kafka's writings about characters ensnared by the world around them for no apparent reason are recognized as brilliant manifestations of literary modernism. Murray (Bruce Chatwin, etc.) is an experienced biographer and effectively relates Kafka's brief life, trying valiantly to depict a more normal Kafka, a man who lived in society with good friends, enjoyed sex, had wide-ranging intellectual interests and became enamored of Judaism. In Murray's account, Kafka's employer valued him highly, and under the imprint of no less a figure than Kurt Wolff, he experienced some literary success. Despite Murray's best efforts to contain Kafka's idiosyncrasies, though, the writer remains the tormented soul who created out of his personal anxieties and agonies some of the most acclaimed works of the 20th century. Agent, Derek Johns at A.P. Watt. (Sept. 30)n Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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