Michael Wood writes:

We rightly think of Kafka as a sufferer and a victim, the tormented subject of nightmares, the man whose initial identifies, in one novel, a figure caught up in an absurd trial and in another, the land surveyor we have seen sleeping through his possible salvation. But we can also think of him as a master of nightmares, a connoisseur of them, and we can remember that he smiled, as Brod tells us, when he made his remark about the plentitude of hope. Stanley Corngold, in an introductory essay to The Office Writings, says that Kafka’s goal or need – ‘the mandate . . . laid on him’ – was ‘to write well at some unheard of degree of proficiency or be lost’. This is beautifully put, and while we can only guess at what Kafka’s idea of proficiency was, what level of writerly achievement would have made him want to save more than a few pieces from the bonfire he asked Brod to make of his manuscripts, there is a kind of evidence in the consummately managed irony of his logical conundrums. And here he may place himself not in K’s shoes, or not only in K’s shoes, but also those of the speculating but uninvolved Bürgel, who sees the desolation in all the failed approaches to the intractable castle, but also the almost musical grace with which chance steps in and rescues the institution from its own vulnerability.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Princeton | hardback 404 pp. |ISBN: 9780691126807