F.K.

I've just finished reading the middle volume (the first vol. doesn't yet exist and the 3rd vol. isn't in my school's library) of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka (Kafka: The Decisive Years).  1st, I can't believe that any biography of Kafka could have the word decisive in its title!  But it still offers a fantastic discussion of Kafka's lunatic marriage proposal to Felice Bauer, which has to be the worst and most comical proposal of all time: he spends reams of paper explaining exactly why he is unsuitable for marriage at all and specifically to her.  So, of course, she accepts--which complicates Kafka's life immensely. (They never got married although they got engaged later on again--but again didn't get married.)  Another quotation from his relentless diary: "Often--and in my innermost self possibly all the time--I doubt that I am a human being."  But then the biographer annoys me with the following statement: "In his everyday interactions, Kafka resorted to ironic laments, gestures of comic desperation, which hid the true extent of his precarious inner state.  By social convention, anyone who whines is not suffering profoundly."  What the hell?  I whine, probably incessantly, and I think I suffer, even profoundly, he said whiningly.