Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life

In a swaggering, sometimes condescending and often contentious introduction to Kafka, Hawes draws on the writer's stories, diaries and letters, as well as contemporary cultural documents as he asks the real Kafka to please stand up. Rather than the conventional portrait of a lonely figure whose day job deprived him of time to write—an image he calls “the K.-myth”—Hawes discovers a confident lawyer who never lacked friends and whose early writings were admired and promoted by Rilke, Hermann Hesse and Robert Musil. Hawes also takes on the view that Kafka feared women and sex; he underscores Kafka's “compulsive” brothel visits; and like other well-to-do young men of his class, Hawes says, Kafka had a sexual liaison with a working-class woman. Hawes also makes much of his revelation that Kafka read highbrow pornography. More original is Hawes's reinterpretation of The Metamorphosis by finding its source in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther . Although this book will provoke many Kafka scholars, its invitation to see Kafka in a new light encourages a fresh understanding of one of the 20th century's most enigmatic writers. B&w photos. (July)