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Telling the story of Kafka's final years as never
before-the third volume in the acclaimed definitive
biography This volume of Reiner Stach's acclaimed and
definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final
years of the writer's life, from 1916 to 1924-a period during which
the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach's riveting
narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafka's life
and works, draws readers in with nearly cinematic precision,
zooming in for extreme close-ups of Kafka's personal life, then
pulling back for panoramic shots of a wider world blighted by World
War I, disease, and inflation. In these years, Kafka was spared
military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant
brought him into chilling proximity with its grim realities. He was
witness to unspeakable misery, lost the financial security he had
been counting on to lead the life of a writer, and remained captive
for years in his hometown of Prague. The outbreak of tuberculosis
and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a
double shock for Kafka, and made him agonizingly aware of his
increasing rootlessness. He began to pose broader existential
questions, and his writing grew terser and more reflective, from
the parable-like Country Doctor stories and A Hunger
Artist to The Castle . A door seemed to open in the
form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena
Jesenská. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably
ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However,
his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final
period of his life became the years of insight.