The New Yorker:

We think of him as a recluse, but an unfiltered translation of his diaries, published today, reveals an artist who was often antic, alive, and in motion.

By Becca Rothfeld 

Literature usually reaches us in its finished form, when it has already ossified into irrevocability. By the time a book is bound and printed, it is easy to forget that the words were once in motion. Franz Kafka’s fitful fiction provides a reminder. Most of his work was published posthumously, through the efforts of his best friend, Max Brod, and much of it still bears the marks of its author’s uncertainty. Kafka finished none of the three novels he started, and his final attempt, “The Castle,” leaves off abruptly midsentence.

Not only are Kafka’s fictions incomplete; many of them also contain meditations on the impossibility of completion. A messenger in one of his stories travels through one antechamber after another without ever reaching the person to whom his message is addressed. A lawyer in Kafka’s second novel, “The Trial,” drafts and redrafts a petition that is “never finished,” and a character in “The Castle” wonders, as he clambers toward the fortress of the title, “Could this path be endless?” If Kafka’s works are as endless as the path to the Castle, it is because they teem with potent indeterminacies. In these “fairy tales for dialecticians,” as Walter Benjamin once called them, rules are enforced, then revoked; principles are established, then contravened. The behavior of a bureaucrat from the Castle can “mean that the official procedure has begun, but it can also mean that the official procedure has not yet even begun.” Defendants in “The Trial” spend hours mired in Talmudic debates about the conduct of court officials, all without coming to any consensus about what it signifies. They know they live in a world of omens, but they cannot begin to fathom what the omens mean. Before they are found guilty, much less sentenced, they are already condemned to a hell of eternal interpretation.

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