Biography: By profession Mr K. was a civil servant, and according to the testimony of his colleagues, which we have no reason to doubt, a conscientious and effective one. By temperament he seems to have been a man of nervous disposition. Nor, sadly, was he endowed with good health, being much given throughout his short life to neuralgias, sleeplessness and sundry morbid fears.
He lived quietly with his parents and sisters in the old city of Prague. Though German in culture, he learned also to speak the Czech tongue of his Bohemian neighbours. He always displayed a keen interest in literature, particularly of the more modern sort. It is said that he wrote stories himself, sitting awake at his desk late into the night. Some fragments indeed of these, we are told, have been published at Leipzig and are thought by Mr K.'s friends, Mr Brod and Mr Werfel, to be of a high literary quality. He never married.
When the tuberculosis finally did for Franz Kafka at the age of 40 a very respectable number of his friends and admirers turned up for the memorial service; none present however could have guessed how commonplace the adjective derived from his name would later become or have forecast the full measure of his future status as a cultural figure, a status we must, with some reluctance, call "iconic".
The name of Kafka, like those of equally blameless icons Joyce and Orwell, has been much abused - taken in vain we once said - by the junior cultural critics who infest the foothills of "quality" journalism and for whom every mildly frustrating encounter with bureaucracy is Kafkaesque, every security measure Orwellian and every forced pun Joycean. For a generation after his death Kafka's literary reputation grew. Then, with a new and somewhat lazier generation, reputation was replaced by celebrity. For students in the 1970s, The Castle or The Trial was the book you placed on top of your pile for the girls to see. Harmless enough perhaps, though one egregious type ensured he would be long remembered when he answered the question "How did you spend the summer?" with the curt response "Rereading Kafka". Kafka's "iconic status" has been enhanced by certain qualities of his novels and stories - baffling but plain and spare in style; by what we thought we knew of his life - toiled unhappily as a lowly clerk, frustrated in love, died of TB; by his complex cultural origins - the mesh of Jewishness, Germanism, Czechness; by knowledge of what was to happen to his people in the generation after his death; above all perhaps by the photographs of his extraordinary face - that spooky, spiritual beauty and those eyes.
Nicholas Murray's wise, engaging and level-headed biography takes us back to the considerable complexities of the real man, as a precursor perhaps to a return to the real books. Firstly, Kafka was not a petty clerk but a doctor in law of the Ferdinand Karl University in Prague who worked as a legal expert for the splendidly named Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. His job concerned the prevention of industrial accidents and the protection of workers who suffered them. Like many another whose main interests, even raison d'être, lay elsewhere, he often found his duties irksome, but he carried them out scrupulously, was highly respected by his colleagues and promoted several times.
To say that Kafka was unhappy in love is both an understatement and an inadequate response to the sheer enormity of his emotional peculiarity; one might fairly say that he was often in love with love, always in love with unhappiness and most in love with unhappy, impossible love. He first met Berlin businesswoman Felice Bauer in August 1912; he was not to see her again for another six months. In the meantime he showered her with hundreds of letters, 54 in December alone, letters full of doubt, self-loathing, passionate advance and frightened retreat. It is difficult to see what Franz and Felice had in common. As Kafka's final lover, Dora Diamant, put it: "She was an excellent girl, but utterly bourgeois. Kafka felt that marrying her would mean marrying the whole lie that was Europe". After five years, a quarter of a million words and two on-off engagements, Felice escaped, to be succeeded by Milena Jesenská, a Czech intellectual who understood and admired his work. Milena in her turn would also be rejected - the absolute primacy of his writing, the burning desire for, yet the impossibility of, love and marriage - different girl, same story. In his final illness Kafka was looked after gently and selflessly by Dora Diamant, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish intellectual.
It is customary to see self-regard as an almost unforgivable sin. Yet Kafka seems to have been loved by everyone who encountered him. Milena wrote in a press obituary: "Few people knew him . . . for he was a recluse, a wise man who was afraid of life . . . He was shy, timid, gentle and good, but the books he wrote were cruel and painful . . . [he] saw the world so clearly that he could not bear it and had to die, for he was unwilling to make concessions, to take refuge, as others do, in intellectual delusions, however noble." In a letter to Max Brod she wrote: "His books are amazing. He himself is infinitely more amazing . . ."
Summer stretches ahead; time for some rereading . . .
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist