Kafka: The Years of Insight

(Princeton University Press) This third volume of Kafka’s biography chronicles the final years of the writer’s life, from 1916 to 1924. Although Kafka did not serve in World War I, he witnessed its grim realities, lost his financial security, and pursued an unfulfilled romance with Czech journalist Milena Jesenská. He also came down with tuberculosis. His writing during this period is some of his most mysterious and surreal, and, Stach argues, his most insightful. Frisch has translated many other books from German, including biographies of Nietzche and Einstein.