Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

Perhaps more so than any other twentieth century author, Franz Kafka has become legendary. One of the major components of the Kafka legend is his awkward, poignant, on-again-off-again relationship with Felice Bauer, with whom he was twice engaged and to whom he wrote hundreds of letters over a five-year span (1912 to 1917). Shortly before she died, Bauer sold her letters from Kafka to Schocken Books, and their publication opened a new chapter of Kafka studies and unloosed a small flood of books and articles. Among them, and almost surely the best, is this gem by Elias Canetti, KAFKA'S OTHER TRIAL: THE LETTERS TO FELICE.Canetti, who is too-little known in the U.S., was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. His writings are extraordinarily diverse. They include plays and novels, and thus he brought to his study of Kafka the experience and insights of a writer of creative fiction.In this short book of 130 pages, Canetti's principal project is to show how Kafka's evolving relationship with Bauer, as reflected in his letters to her, affected his writing. After his initial meeting with Bauer at the home of his friend Max Brod one evening in September 1912, Kafka did not see her again for six months, but he wrote her dozens of impassioned letters and at the same time experienced his greatest spurt of literary productivity, writing, among other things, "The Judgment", "The Stoker", and "The Metamorphosis" (which Canetti calls "one of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century"). During this time, Kafka was, Canetti writes, "feeling what he needed to feel: security somewhere far off, a source of strength sufficiently distant to leave his sensitivity lucid, not perturbed by too close a contact -- a woman who was there for him, who did not expect more from him than his words." Whenever, however, their relationship became more than epistolary, whenever social and family pressures (and Bauer's desires) brought them together, Kafka's psyche convulsed and the literary springs dried up. Kafka's second greatest burst of creativity -- it produced much of "The Trial", "In the Penal Colony", and the last chapter of "Amerika" -- occurred after Bauer broke off their second engagement at a gathering of friends and family in July 1914. Kafka regarded the gathering to be a public humiliation and referred to it as a "tribunal", but he also was tremendously relieved to be free to pursue his writing . . . and so he did.One of Canetti's arguments is that the structure of "The Trial" mirrors the period of Kafka's betrothal to Felice Bauer: their engagement becomes the arrest in the first chapter of the novel; the "tribunal" appears as the execution in the last. It is an intriguing argument, although I am not completely persuaded.In the course of surveying Kafka's letters to Bauer and connections between them and Kafka's literary works -- all of which is adroitly handled and never descends to mind-numbing literary exegesis -- Canetti makes a number of noteworthy observations about Kafka and his work. Here is a sampling (all of which are fleshed out in discussions of a few pages):* Kafka was obsessed with his body and with its thinness;* "Fear of a superior power is central to Kafka";* Kafka's struggle with his father was not a Freudian Oedipal struggle but rather "a struggle against superior power as such" ("He hated his family as a whole; his father was simply the most powerful part of this family.");* "One of [Kafka's] central themes is humiliation";* "[B]y virtue of some of his stories, Kafka belongs in the annals of Chinese literature. Often since the eighteenth century, European authors have take up Chinese themes. But the only writer of the Western world who is essentially Chinese is Kafka."I cannot conceive of someone new to Kafka getting much out of this book. On the other hand, for those already reasonably familiar with his oeuvre and with the basic elements of his biography, KAFKA'S OTHER TRIAL should be very rewarding..

Clean copy

Perfect condition!

My review is not of the actual book —Canetti’s genius is here as obvious and relevant as always— but of the edition sold by Amazon.What you will get is a print-on-demand edition of the book, not the actual one published by Schocken. I wish they mentioned that in the books’s description.

Canetti presents a readable overview of Kafka's intense correspondence with Felice Bauer, providing a rough biographical sketch of the author during this turbulent (two abortive engagements to the same woman) yet productive (Metamorphosis, e.g.) time in his life. I don't think Canetti succeeded in proving his notion that Kafka's landmark novel The Trial is a fictionalized representation of his oddly doomed relationship with Felice, but he does point out several interesting parallels which can enhance your enjoyment of Joseph K's misadventures. The real value of Canetti's book is, in my opinion, the fact that it will probably inspire you to read Kafka's own diaries and the actual letters to Felice themselves, and probably with a greater appreciation as well.

excellent book,I love it,somthing special.