Against the night

Franz Kafka wrote as insurance against suffering the fates of his characters. It was as if every hour he spent writing, by candlelight and, later, by electric light, was an installment paid against darkness. He knew that with a stroke of the pen he could conceivably, at any time, have restored to Joseph K. his easy life before The Trial, and obtained for land surveyor K. a better position with a gentler Castle. But this is what makes Kafka the great writer of what has been called Modernity: That he stayed true to his fictions, and retained their tragedy.

This week, Joshua Cohen writes about Kafka's office writings at Nextbook. (Five installments.)

(Correction made: Nextbook, not The Forward!)

Not for us

We might think of Kafka’s response to his friend Max Brod’s question about hope and whether there was any outside the world as we know it. ‘Plenty of hope,’ Kafka said. ‘But not for us.’

Where did Kafka learn to think like this? A case could be made that he found his training not in his intricate psyche or in his horrified commitment to writing – ‘the service of the Devil’, he called it – but in his day job at the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance.

—Michael Wood on Kafka's office writings, London Review of Books

(From Jenny)

Der Office

I. Princeton University Press announces a new title:

Franz Kafka: The Office Writings brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night.

These documents include articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka's writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Beautifully translated, with valuable commentary by two of the world's leading Kafka scholars and one of America's most eminent civil rights lawyers, the documents cast rich light on the man and the writer and offer new insights to lovers of Kafka's novels and stories.

(From John Mark)



II. What Would Don Draper Do?

(From Jessica)

Desk set

It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time. —Louis Begley on Kafka, as quoted by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books

(Via Jenny)

"Through Kafka's eyes"

Like Dunder Mifflin seen through Kafka’s eyes, the novel explores the distinct boredom of Cubicle Land.

Unfolding in Post-it–size passages and sections structured like software manuals, the novel takes aim at procrastination, paranoia, office supply pilfering, and computer-crashing e-mails of kittens, along with the etiquette of shared elevator rides, cigarette breaks, and after-work drinks.

Personal Days doesn’t stop at satire. Park navigates hilariously between gentle irony and genuine anguish, much like that mocking question your computer asks each night before you log off.

Are you sure you want to quit?

—Daily Candy