Aug 21, 2008

Kafka's porn

In a new book, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, James Hawe takes on the myth of Franz Kafka as a gaunt, melancholy, saint-like seer — a "lonely Middle European Nostradamus". From a review in The Observer:—
Rather, he lived with his parents and was set up with a relatively cushy job (six hours a day for the equivalent of £58,000 today), leaving him plenty of time to write. Thanks to his literary connections, he won a major literary prize in his early thirties before even publishing a book. He was not tragically unrequited in his love affairs; nor was he virtually unknown in his lifetime.... Hawes's Kafka is a canny, funny, worldly man who liked to relax by socialising with his many friends, visiting the occasional prostitute — and reading porn.
It makes me think of that great Woody Allen sketch in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, in which a man finds himself turning, not into a cockroach, but a giant marauding breast.

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