Everything you always wanted to know about...

...Franz Kafka, beginning with the the evening of 13 August 1912, when Kafka met Felice Bauer. A few days later, he composed, in a single, one might say fatal, night, his miniature masterpiece, "The Judgement," that perfect microcosm of what would come to be recognised as the "Kafkaesque" universe at large, analyzed rather nicely as follows:

the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero.

Nevertheless, Kafka wrote to Bauer in 1913: "Are you finding any meaning in 'The Judgment,' I mean some straightforward, coherent meaning that can be followed? I am not finding any and I am also unable to explain anything in it."

The summary and citation are from a newly translated and apparently excellent biography of Kafka by Reiner Stach, reviewed by Michael Dirda.

Meanwhile, in the months before he would see Bauer again, Kafka writes to her that "he lives for literature alone," in Dirda's summary, "that he is unsociable, fearful, sickly, unhealthily thin, self-pitying, obsessive, neurotic, without interest in children and probably incapable of sexual intercourse. He has nothing to offer her, except his devotion -- and he's not even sure about that, since it might interfere with his writing."

"Sex with you," as the character Pam says in Woody Allen's Everything you wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask), to cite the one usage of the adjective that does not make me cringe a little, "is really a Kafkaesque experience." Sex with Kafka, as readers of his biographies invariably discover, was much weirder perhaps. But who's asking?