“For some, he’s a frightening figure. Others, who haven’t read him but have heard tell of him, are only afraid he would frighten them. And many more find him sad, though they can’t quite tell you why. Some, sensing a hint of depression, delicately set his slender books aside. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to keep him at arm’s length—not least of which is the rumor that he was more or less insane, which persists to this day and finds ample nourishment even in his finished works.
For some, he breeds impatience, nervousness. His texts are enigmatic, and he seems to take pleasure in leading the reader astray, along labyrinthine, inescapable loops of thought.
And yet some readers—and their numbers have not dwindled over the decades—wholeheartedly embrace him, experiencing his prose as the greatest pleasure that literature has to offer. Not repelled by mysterious plots or by ultimate catastrophes, such readers accept these as images of the impenetrability and finitude of human life, and especially of life in modern, administrated, mass societies. For what makes these images so compelling are not the ideas concealed within them, always open to debate, but rather their aesthetic forms: the crystalline language, the provocative simplicity, the wealth of unheard-of, wonderful metaphors and paradoxes, the virtuosic mastery of dream logic, the showering sparks of humor that illuminate even the darkest moments of calamity. Capable of absolutely anything, he is the author who knows no carelessness, no linguistic ornament, no empty effects. He is the author who never sleeps.” -Reiner Stach on Franz Kafka, from Is That Kafka?: 99 Finds[tr. Kurt Beals]
