A newspaper review opined that the story was “too long, and not captivating enough.” When “The Metamorphosis” was to be published as a book in 1915, Kafka was afraid the cover illustrator would want to draw the insect. He did not like to read to rooms of strangers, but he did read “In the Penal Colony” at a German Expressionist event in Munich. He admitted he had “something against needlework.” He liked to read his work aloud to friends and found it terribly funny, sometimes doubling up with laughter. He insisted he wanted to be a soldier, later a waiter in Palestine. There is a beach named after him in the Baltic seaside resort of Müritz. It could certainly be argued that what he called his “animal stories” - “A Report to an Academy,” “The Burrow,” “Investigations of a Dog” - weren’t about humans at all. He felt he was a citizen of another world, a white desert. He was well respected there and considered invaluable, though he was given endless leaves and extended vacations. He was an executive at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where his associates were lawyers, businessmen and engineers. He was almost six feet tall, meticulously groomed and preternaturally self-absorbed.
We all know how he ate his food: he “Fletcherized” it, chewing each bite a hundred times before swallowing. He lived with his parents well into his 30s, and according to Reiner Stach’s biography, “on Sunday mornings he was always overcome by slight nausea” when he saw their rumpled bedsheets “only a few steps from his own bed.” Kafka gave it to his mother to give to him. It is a fascinating sight because it has human eyes.” The famous and vindictive “Letter to His Father,” which was more than 100 pages long, was never sent to his father, Hermann, a purveyor of fancy goods. He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk.” He was a subject in the playful “Bestiary of Modern Literature,” published in 1922, and was described thus: “The Kafka is a very rare magnificent moon-blue mouse that does not eat meat but feeds on herbs. “Frank does not have the capacity for living. (Once it was the beginning of World War I.) One of his obsessions for a time was the sassy Milena Jesenska, who called him Frank. He asked at least three women to marry him, but something always came up to thwart the nuptials.
Kafka was always burning his stuff, or threatening to, or demanding that others do it for him. They are one of the great unnerving monuments of literature. When he stopped corresponding, he dreamed of her as “someone who was dead and could never live again.” He burned her letters when their long engagement was finally broken off she saved his. In his diary he describes her as having an “empty face that wore its emptiness openly.” From 1912 to 1917 he wrote hundreds of letters to her. He dedicated it to Felice Bauer, a woman he had recently met at his friend Max Brod’s house. “This is the only way to write,” he said. He wrote it in eight hours, almost in ecstasy. He felt his story “The Judgment” to be so. He liked the word “Zweifellosigkeit,” which can be awkwardly translated as “indubitableness.” To be true, a work had to be indubitable.
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