Conversations With Kafka

A literary gem â a portrait from life of Franz Kafka â now with an ardent preface by Francine Prose, avowed â fan of Janouchâ s odd and beautiful book.â

Gustav Janouch met Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of The Metamorphosis, as a seventeen-year-old fledgling poet. As Francine Prose notes in her wonderful preface, â they fell into the habit of taking long strolls through the city, strolls on which Kafka seems to have said many amazing, incisive, literary, and per- things to his companion and interlocutor, the teenage Boswell of Prague. Crossing a windswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch, â Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of oneâ s personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.â â

They talk about writing (Kafkaâ s own, but also that of his favorite writers: Poe, Kleist, and Rimbaud, who â transforms vowels into colorsâ ) as well as technology, film, crime, Darwinism, Chinese philosophy, carpentry, insomnia, street fights, Hindu scripture, art, suicide, and prayer. â Prayer,â Kafka notes, brings â its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of oneâ s own existence.â

Born in Brooklyn, Francine Prose has published fourteen novels. The Washington Post has called her work a “sheer delight.”