I enjoy the Diaries because they contain emotions I’ve felt myself. The “nothings” and “sufferings” are some of my favorite sections of the Diaries, but it isn’t schadenfreude if anything, it’s a different German word, Einfühlung -empathy. Who will save me?’ … November 25, 1914: ‘Utter despair, impossible to pull myself together only when I have become satisfied with my sufferings can I stop.’… July 1, 1914: ‘Too tired.’ (That’s the whole entry.) … September 22, 1917: ‘Nothing.’” We laughed at the total Kafka-ness of these entries, the “utter despair” that seemed such a predictably pervasive mood, even in private. “April 8, 1914: ‘Yesterday incapable of writing even one word. Sitting up now, I flipped through and read selections from his diaries into the phone. According to Kafka’s friend and biographer Max Brod, at the time of his death Kafka was working on his short story, “A Hunger Artist,” about a man whose art form is starvation-one of the grimmest Kafka analogues, in a very competitive field. He had been living with tuberculosis for nearly seven years, and by summer 1924 the state of his throat had made it too painful to eat or drink, sentencing him to death by starvation. Kafka died on June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium outside Vienna, a month shy of his 41st birthday. I took a Kafka seminar one semester, and thought the Diaries might make an enlightening companion piece. ) I’d picked it up at the Book Barn, a rambling used bookstore in Niantic, CT, a short drive from my campus apartment. (The diaries also exist online in the unabridged original German, from the comprehensive Kafka Project. The text was translated by Martin Greenberg with the aid of Hannah Arendt, of all people. Published in English by Schocken Books, now a Knopf imprint specializing in Jewish literature-my Diaries is a third printing, from 1971. Sprawled across my bed, I stared idly at the bookshelf and pulled down a beat-up volume I’d had since college, when my friend and I had shared a microwave: The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923. He was cramming for an exam so hadn’t had much time, and I’d just finished the most recent of New York’s unspoken book club, when you and every third person on the subway seems to have gotten the same recommendation.

One night not long ago, on the phone with a college friend, the conversation turned to what we’d been reading.

Franz kafka the process