Reiner Stach Kafka: The Decisive Years.(Shorter notices)(Book review)

Reiner Stach Kafka: The Decisive Years. Harcourt, 592 pages, $35

Upon finishing Kafka's The Trial, the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky noted, "The reader of a book knows after twenty or thirty, pages what kind of a writer he is dealing with, what the book is, how it flows, whether it is meant to be taken seriously, how to classify it. Here you know nothing, you grope in the dark. What is this? Who is that?" In the case of Reiner Stach's Kafka: The Decisive Years, far fewer than "twenty or thirty pages" are required for an accurate forecast of the chapters to come.

While Stach's study is indisputably complete and Shelley Frisch's translation from the German is beautifully wrought, the first pages of Kafka read like a balance sheet, with Kafka's existence reduced to "forty years and eleven months" with "sixteen years six and a half months in school and at university, and nearly fifteen years in professional life" with "about forty-five days abroad."

And as for his love life? "He was engaged three times" and "shared an apartment with a woman for about six months of his life" Kafka's body of work consisted of the "forty complete prose texts" he left and "3,400 pages of diary entries and literary fragments." Here too, Stach explicates his methodology ...