I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Since my first encounter with Kafka's writing, I've been interested in a quality that, while he was alive, stood in the way of his achieving a large reputation: his allegory.
It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.
One of the influences of Kafka over later writers is not so much in the content of his work as in its form.
I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.
My main ambition as a teenager was to somehow resurrect the dark-minded writer Franz Kafka and become his girlfriend.
I did my dissertation on Kafka.
Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes.
My own interest in Kafka's letter came about when I was writing an article on Peter Ginz, the boy novelist held in Terezin, not far from Prague, and exterminated in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The Ginz family were from more or less the same milieu as the Kafkas.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.