Franz Kafka - Louis Begley

After Kafka it can be argued literature was not the same. In the few novels and short stories he left behind, he distilled the horrors of the new age. Kafka's is the voice of the outsider, at once defined by its affiliations and completely, utterly alone. The product of a transitional age and a territory in flux, Kafka spoke and wrote German in a Czech territory and was a Jew among Christians. Begley, himself a bilingual outsider, renders Kafka's life with sensitivity and insight and opens a window on a tormented soul - one of the most intriguing figures of the modern world.