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erature? How else could his personal obsessions become parables of
the modern predicament?
One of the things that makes Pawel's book so sound is his aver–
sion to academic critics, who play games with Kafka's "text," and to
the deconstructionists, who create a new one . Their zealous "inter–
pretations" have even shrunk Kafka- as the subhero of
Metamorphosis
was dehumanized - into a God-seeker, a Zionist, an atheist, a pur–
veyor of guilt, an exposer of bureaucracy, a prophet of totalitarian–
ism, a writer of case histories. The fact is that Kafka's fiction has
many meanings and that they fade into each other, perhaps more so
than in any other modern writer, because of the ambiguity with
which he looked at every human question. His main themes-guilt,
anguish, fear of and attraction to authority, ambivalence about
women - blend into and work against each other like the themes in a
Bach fugue. The very wealth of detail uncovered by Pawel precludes
simple explanations and makes us even more aware of the overwhelm–
ing complexity of Kafka's writing as well as of his life.
We also get a fuller picture of Kafka's unresolved relations with
the various women he almost married. Earlier portraits suggested
only anguish and revulsion when marriage seemed imminent. But
the complete story reveals periods of exacerbated, almost manic pas–
sion toward the women who found it hard to enter or to leave his life.
It should be noted, too, that Pawel makes use of psychoanalytic in–
sights in probing Kafka's psychic disorders, but he does so with ad–
mirable moderation, thus avoiding the clinical reductions of much
psychoanalytic criticism .
One fault of Pawel's book should not go unnoticed: the writing
is occasionally off key , and words awkwardly chosen, but it is a minor
blemish that might have been removed by a good copy editor. Un–
fortunately, one is made particularly aware of this failing in a book
about a writer whose prose did not have a single false note - not even
in his letters and diaries.
Though not explicitly, both books raise questions about the
purpose of biography.
It
is usually assumed that aside from satisfy–
ing our curiosity about famous people's lives, particularly if there are
dark secrets, biography provides clues to a writer's work. But
biographies such as these two about Eliot and Kafka have an added
dimension. They carry us back to the golden age of modernism,
dominated by those large figures who towered over their contem–
poraries. And in getting a close-up of that extraordinary and
