Kafka

The Torment of Man

by R. M. Alberes and Pierre de Boisdeffre

Vision Press Limited, 1968, hardcover

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear, a little rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, ex-library with tape residue on covers, stamp to bottom fore edge, stickers, stamps and tape residue to endpapers (see photographs)

“Introduction:
During his lifetime Franz Kafka remained almost utterly unknown.  Max Brod writes that after his friend’s death it was not easy to find an important publisher who would undertake to bring out a posthumous edition of Kafka’s work.  Gerhart Hauptmann, a publisher to whom Brod appealed for help, had never heard of Kafka.
Today – forty-two ears since Kafka’s death – the picture is radically changed.  The literary world has deep interest in Franz Kafka, the artist described by Claude Mauriac as “this very sick man, stricken in both mind and body” who “personifies the imbalance of our time”.  Today almost all literary reviews, whether English or American, French or German, reflect this interest.  All of Kafka’s writings are available in English as well as Max Brod’s Franz Kafka, a Biography.
As Max Brod has noted, “Now that the personality of Kafka has more or less entered the common domain, we are faced with the inevitable distortions of his image”.  Time only – with its production of many portraitures of Kafka, the man and the artist – will allow the true image of this complex figure to emerge.  The reader who desires to know the true image, to understand the “imbalance of our time”, and to see how Kafka personifies it, will welcome this biography written by two well known French critics, R. M. Alberes and Pierre de Boisdeffre and translated by Dr. Wade Baskin”