Excavating Kafka
Excavating Kafka can get very tiresome at times. Never been a follower of the ‘K-myth’. I bought the book because I live in a country where the offer of books in English is so limited that I feel I have exhausted all their readable offer. This one has proved highly overpriced.
I expected unbiased information about Kafka. A biography that will spare me of the emo-writer portrait. What I received was an unexpectedly enthusiastic debunking of Kafka as a legendarily lonely, depressed urbanite. The idea of the emo writer never appealed to me before and will hardly dig roots from now on, as such.
The emotional charge of Excavating Kafka is irritating and superfluous. It feels like the author is fighting against his own deformed perception of Kafka and we pay (a too high price) to watch the show.
The whole study could be summarized in: Kafka was a normal person with a gift for literature.
Later edit. An article on Prague by the same author: Repression’s Capital, Europe’s Canary
