Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life by James Hawes (2008 - St. Martin's Press)

I first started reading Franz Kafka in high school. The strange and isolated man, stuck in a place he felt at war with, dominated by a father he feared more then death was just the writer for me and my romantic notion of being too good for the dump of a small town in which I felt trapped.

After reading John Hawes' almost blasphemous re-evaluation of our idea of Kafka, who we think he was as a person and how it has been twisted, edited, cropped, and sometimes outright falsified to fit the nature of his work, I now see clearly that my idea of myself, as seen through my idea of Kafka, was just shy of delusional. (Let's face it, you don't sit poolside at the very southern country club your parents belong to, chain smoking and reading a book with a picture of a giant cockroach on the cover and expect Sarah McPopularity to swim over and ask you to the prom.) It seems that publishers then, as they do now, knew the value of an author's image.

Here's just a small sampling of the "Kafka Myth" that Hawes debunks:

(1) Kafka was a lonely and sexually repressed introvert.

In fact he spent most of his evenings socialize in wine bars and going to brothels. Recall the famous picture of dear Franz in a bowler hat, petting a dog? Well, that wasn't his dog. It belonged to one of his favorite prostitues who was sitting on the other side of the pooch when the photo was taken, but was cropped out of the picture. The original was only recently uncovered.

(2) Kafka suffered under the repressive beurocracy in which he worked during the day, and this is reflected in his writing.

Completely false. Kafka came from an upper-class merchant family. His family owned an asbestos factory, and a block of residential real estate in Prague. In addition, Franz was a valued and well-paid lawyer in his firm.

(3) He was virtually unknown during his short life.

Nein!!! Kafka was very widely published in both Chezh and German during his life-time and sharred the coveted Fontane Prize; a big deal in early 20th Century German lit.

(4) His masterpieces, like The Trial and The Metamophosis, stand alone in literary originality.

Nada. He stole the idea of turning into a bug directly from the Superman of German letters, Johann Goethe, and the basic outline of The Trial from one of his biggest influences, Sherlock Holmes. That's right; Franz was a verocious reader of detective novels. This is not second hand info. This fact comes directly from his own pen through his diaries. It was only recently brought to light because it had been previously edited out by publishers who saw such a popular writer's influence to be in conflict with their marketable Kafka Myth.