#kafka biography

[amtskind]

@sepulkralkreatur and i binge-watched the new kafka biopic-series, produced by german television. and i got to say - i loved it so much.

it combined the littlest details from kafka's life and also his aftermath, with his literary work - which often was linked to certain events. for those who read his work and diaries/biographies, spotting all the little references was very fun. and one of my most favourite things was probably the narrator with the reoccurring break of the fourth wall - as well as the music and collage-esque animations.

every episode was told through the perspective of significant people from kafka's life and dealt with a certain theme:

- as well as a 7th bonus-episode "kafka and me", which was more of a documental biography take with interviews, with a dog narrating the scenario and kafka's impact on our society.

joel basman did a great job at portraying franz kafka. the voice, the laugh and facial expressions being awkward all were very fitting and closing the hole, that we as readers experience towards kafka as a person.

the non-linear series served the exact atmosphere, that i associate with kafka: tragedy, humour, and the absurd. daniel kehlmann and david schalko did a great job on writing it. chapeau!

more posts about this series:

comparison of the actors and their roles

intro animations

scene: kafka at the yiddish theater

scene: kafka laughing

franz, dora and their shadow-play

kafka's literary works in the series

[bouxmounir]

La nouvelle traduction de Franz Kafka dans la Pléiade montre qu'il a peur de l'allemand

La nouvelle traduction de Franz Kafka dans la Pléiade montre qu’il a peur de l’allemand

La prestigieuse collection de Gallimard sera publiée ce jeudi 12 mai sur les œuvres III et IV du jeune écrivain praguas. Entièrement rétractés sous la direction du germaniste Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, ses textes non romanesques montrent la défiance du romancier, encore bilingue, vis-à-vis de la langue de Goethe. La nouvelle traduction française des journaux et des lettres de Franz Kafka dans le…

[fer1972]

I've published in spanish my own biography of Franz Kafka, "The professional of defeat".

Soon it will be translated to english and for sell in Amazon.

[alienejj]

On Reading and Books

I took these pictures myself. Some of these books are old, some were just poorly handled over the years, and all were thrifted across the second-hand stores of Dublin.

Here I link every post I make on quotes, musings, and letter extracts from authors to do with books and reading. I keep it up to date.

I own books of all genres, so from fiction, you can expect: high fantasy, urban fantasy, classic literature, modern classics, short story anthologies, poetry, translated fiction, Asian fiction, Middle Eastern fiction, North African fiction, African fiction, Western fiction, Irish fiction, myth and folklore retelling, historical fiction, murder mysteries/crime fiction.

And from non-fiction, you can expect: European history, African history, Irish history, Asian history, Middle Eastern history, Islamic history, biographies and memoirs (of classic authors, world travellers, queens, and empresses), science, female health, culture and anthropology, self-help, psychology, on writing, on reading, myth and folklore, travel memoirs.

As such you can expect quotes from authors of various backgrounds.

These are short posts, made up of the extract ill quote from the author and then a picture I've taken of books from my home library.

Marcel Proust.

J. R. R. Tolkien.

Donna Tartt.

Franz Kafka.

Vladimir Nabokov.

William Faulkner.

Ian McEwan.

Italo Calvino.

Virginia Woolf.

Smell of Books.

Cats n Books

Charles Dickens.

Jules Verne.

About Me

Bookblr Masterlist

Bookish Thrift Finds Masterlist

I reblog bookish content and since I have a home library I also make bookish content myself; aesthetic book pics, reviews, recommendations, quotes, excerpts, hauls and cats.

[hopefull-mindset]

I've started reading The Great Gatsby (I've fallen into the reading classical literature trap 😔. I really need to finish Crime and Punishment.)

Anyhow I think it's really interesting how Asagiri chose to characterize many of the people in BSD. Especially after learning that irl Fitzgerald was more of a cynical person (at least towards the end of his life) than his animated counterpart. And it made me think of all the other characters of the show and how their characterized.

What was Asagiri's purpose as he came together with these characters? Why'd he have some characters act as their irl counterparts while others act more like the characters they wrote or people in their lives?

These aren't really questions that I wanted the answers to they were moreso just thoughts that I had. I'd love to have a peek into this man's mind and how it works

I think a lot of us have fallen into that trap LMAO. This is my favorite topic though. I could talk about this forever because Kafka Asagiri is an interesting person who has integrated a lot of literature into this one series. I don't know what goes on in this man’s mind and I know these aren't literal questions, but I am interested in sharing what I know!

As you've pointed out, some characters do act more like the people in these works written by them than the actual people. BSD isn't purely just taking these authors, their relationships, and then implementing them just like that. it also takes these authors’ literary personas, their impact socially, and their works to make them into who they are. Asagiri is doing this because it makes it more interesting, but also imagine writing about this authors where most of them lived depressing lives with qualities that don’t make uh, the type of story you want to tell.

I’m impressed with how creative he is.

I’m trying to limit myself on how much I should talk about this, but I fear that I’ll leave out important bits about how Asagiri incorporates these people into the work. I’m also just jittering and excited. Like I almost forgot to bring up the fact the reason BSD has a war narrative is because it takes Japanese authors from Meiji to Shōwa era, so about the time Western influence kicked in, forcing them to modernize and keep up with the rest of the world during what is a fairly short time for huge development like this, to post-war Japan where, you know, the Occupation of Japan is happening and they have to intake the traumatic repercussions of everything before that.

This can make The Great War functionally WW2, but obviously not a one to one match. I’m not a historian or anything, but this should come to mind for anyone who’s in the know about some Japanese history. Now that I’m bringing it up though, Mori’s attitude during the flashback with Yosano is put into context because he pretty much says himself that he needs his country to realize that they keep up with the rest of the world and that the battlefield is changing, and real life Japan did not care about how they did that.

With N, Chuuya, and Stormbringer too. I’m almost hesitant to bring this up because it’s so serious, but yes, Japan did do lethal human experimentation for that same purpose to keep up with the rest of the world and prove themselves.

Ahh, I went off track. Sorry, we were talking about how Asagiri writes characters, right? There is a lot of crossover between the real authors and their writing, so it’s sorta hard to tell with people like Dazai where the work influence ends and the the real person begins.

For me currently in my classic lit research period, I’m almost upset at myself for barley reading anything by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa because he’s my favorite character. I’ve just been so caught up doing my Oda Sakunosuke essay that I don’t have too much time for other authors. I’ve also picked up “The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Kyōka” recently (and A New Hamlet by Osamu Dazai, but that’s not important).

Ah, how much should I talk about.… hmm… how about Chuuya as an example of Literary Voice vs Real Person…. Lucy Montgomery and Edgar Allen Poe for Social Impact (for Japan specifically)…. and then.. Oh whatever, I’ll figure it out. One day I’ll talk about Kyouka, but not now. I’d feel ill prepared.

If you’ve ever read a poem by Chuuya Nakahara, taken in the emotion and deep feeling, and then found any fun facts about his interactions with other authors, there’s a huge contrast between those two modes that can be jarring. Im sure you can tell how that carries over to BSD. I’m impressed by how Asagiri is able to balance both the brash attitude of Chuuya and the inner literary voice that voices the emotion and care he has in him.

Edgar Allen Poe is slightly more obvious than Lucy’s influence (or maybe it’s Lucy’s, ah it depends), but both pop out at you when it’s pointed out. He was one of the first American authors to be introduced to Japan and fairly popular, but mainly we would point to Edogawa Ranpo as the most blatantly influenced by him and who his name is quite literally attached to. While Lucy Montgomery isn’t attached to anyone in particular, Anne of The Green Gables was wildly distributed in Japan when there were few english children books and became a hit.

There’s a television series too if you search for it. Any redhead, pigtail-braided girl you see in some Japanese media is because of her! It’s probably why these two have the most presence in the story currently compared to other members of the Guild and work with the Agency at times.

There are times when Asagiri will use influences outside of the author’s own catalog to create them, some literary like Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus (in writing characters like Dazai or Fyodor, I could make a post about that), and some just of his own anime/manga interests in other series like Jojo, Cowboy Bebop, Black Lagoon, etc. if you’re familiar.

I’d feel bad if I don’t at least show one example of this so, how about an Odasaku example with The Long Goodbye by Reymond Chandler? I was going to avoid talking about him until the essay, but I can’t help myself. Many have pointed out these parallels before, but Asagiri did point it to be his favorite book last year in an interview.

If you’ve noticed that the presentation for Dark Era in the anime comes off like a Noir film just like how Untold Origins came off like a black and white samurai film, good job! The Long Goodbye is a Noir novel about a detective named Phillip Marlowe who is unable to let go of a case involving a friend that was accused of murdering his own wife, but supposedly commits suicide and confesses to it before Marlowe is able to leave custody. By the end of the book, he uncovers the real perpetuator (a past lover of Terry Lennox’s before he was ever called by that name) and finds out where Lennox really is by poking into the story of where the message he got was sent.

He comes in with a new look and identity, and he asks if it’s too early for a gimlet. They say their last few words to each other, Marlowe flipping back and forth from acknowledging him as Terry Lennox and as a person he never knew, and then Marlowe tells him that “he’s not here anymore”. Marlowe had already told him goodbye when it was sad and lonely, so Lennox does the same here. That ends that mutual, long goodbye and he never sees Lennox again.

The immediate response I’ve see about this is how it parallels the relationship between Dazai and Odasaku. In The Day I Picked Up Dazai, just like how Marlowe brings him to his home to clean him up and meet up at the same bar for the next few months of their friendship, Odasaku also does so with Dazai and drinks a Gimlet for reasons he doesn’t know. In reality, Gimlets are a representation of the friendship between Marlowe and Lennox as it’s Lennox’s favorite drink. It makes it a little painful when Marlowe ignores him when he ask to go get a gimlet at that same bar they always went.

BEAST is more hyper specific about it by having Dazai ask the same question that Lennox asks when he gets smoked out and Odasaku asking for a gimlet with no bitters, which is specifically how Lennox takes it. Odasaku does not drink the gimlet at all though, showing that there is not friendship to start or accept or say goodbye to, as Lennox does ask Marlowe to drink a Gimlet to say goodbye to him in the letter. Just like TDIPUD is like their beginning, BEAST is their ending without ending because BEAST Dazai is not the same person he was friends with.

Odasaku fulfills being a detective and Dazai is the tragic friend with a past he doesn’t say anything about. Great. Now what I think people are missing when they entirely focus on Odasaku and Dazai when they talk about Lennox and Marlowe is that Lennox is narratively also Andre Gide.

If we were to split Lennox into three people just like his three identities, this is what it would look like:

The Friend: You help him out and don’t judge for his faults, in turn you go out to a bar with each other. It’s uneasy, but it’s worth a lot to the both of you. Eventually you have to part ways in death. (Dazai & Terry Lennox)

The Unknown: Is he someone you know? He acts like it, but he looks nothing like what you’ve encounter before. Maybe in some world you were, but that’s not now and it’s too late for this goodbye to be playing out. You let it happened though and you never see him again when he walks out that door. (BEAST Dazai & “Señor Maioranos”)

The Soldier: The past is right around the corner and its come to bite you in the ass. White hair and war memories haunting him with a scar as a reminder, he’s a reflection of you but maybe not. Who knows? (Andre Gide & “Paul Marston.”)

The initials “P.M.” of both his past name and Phillip Marlowe’s is meant to clue in how Eileen (the past lover) is connected to Lennox by her thinking of Marlowe as her past lover as she attempts to seduce him in some trance. What I’m trying to note here though is that you can take this as Lennox being another reflection of himself. It’s easy to do that reading for both Dazai and Gide as they’re both his foils and are purposely similar, but Gide aligns more with this past identity than Dazai does and retains his white hair.

Uhhh, wasn't planning to make a mini-analysis in the middle of my talking but okay. I'm leaving it off there. I went blank a lot while writing because I didn’t know what I wanted to comment on. There's too much to say about this large cast. I have way more literary fun facts and ideas to say, but nah.

[thegreatgodbird]

—Disco Elysium (2019)

“We are,” he said, “nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that rise up in God’s head”. This reminded me of the worldview of the Gnostics: God is an evil demiurge; the world reflects his fall into sin. “Oh no,” he said, “our world is just a bad mood of God, a bad day.” — “So outside of this world manifestation, which we know, would there be a world that knows hope?” — He smiled: “Oh, hope enough, infinite hope, — just not for us.”

—Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography

[dailykafka]

I was reading the trial and looked at kafka's brief biography at the start of the book. The book decided to include the fact that he got circumcised as a baby

Why was that necessary,i didn't want to know that xd

Well the thing about biographies… they kinda talk about a person's life, including what happened to them when they were a baby…

[i-who-has-never-had-a-name]

Books I will never read

1. Anything by Haruki Murakami, but especially Norwegian Wood.

I've read Kafka on the Shore halfway through and stopped. Also that one handjob scene....no. why. He's a huge misogynist who I do not want to support. I've heard about that one scene in Norwegian Wood with the father's picture...yikes. I like literary fiction the most, which means I want well-written characters meaning all of them should be well-written and have a soul, yes even the female ones. I saw that one picture of pseudo intellectual Harry Styles being in bed reading Norwegian Wood...at this point why? Why do we not question this? I sometimes wonder if this is all an inside joke I'm not into.

2. Any CoHo/Emily Henry/Tiktok romance book

No explanation needed. I'm in a happy relationship and I don't have a son with big balls.

3. Any splatterpunk book (Eric LaRocca's books, Playground)

I like disturbing books, I have nothing against brutal/disgusting scenes and such, but it has to have a purpose. You cannot write such sick, twisted things just for shock value, because you are a writer and should at least be a good one. Splatterpunk writers don't care about that. They write the most sick, twisted things that a human could come up with. It's not revolutionary but tasteless shock. Those people don't love literature, they love gore. It doesn't help that the vast majority of those authors are men and that they let their female and their younger characters experience a lot of pain. They get away with their blatant sadism and sexism by categorizing it as "splatterpunk".

4. That Icebreaker book

Not just bc it's a tiktok romance book, but specifically bc it reminds me of that one tiktok named Kierra I think who was widely sexist and rude and evil to a hockey player's wife just bc she said she didn't want her to make anymore sexual comments about her husband and the father of her child. Wild. You should definitely look into it.

5. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Torture Corn really. Straight women writes queer male characters are tortures them. We've all seen it, really.

6. Any self help book

Pure Scams. It is capitalist propaganda that your problems are based of your material conditions but are purely isolated from the rest of the world and as long you buy my book in which I give you a list of what to do, you won't be happy. When you give me your money, you'll be happy, really!

It definitely doesn't help that most of those authors are white, male and rich.

7. Books with queer male romance written by straight women

I'm not saying straight women don't have the capability to write well-written male queer characters, I'm just saying that there's a pattern...

I've come to this conclusion after reading the beloved "Song Of Achilles". There's a lot of critique I have with this book, mainly it's portrayal of queerness.

8. Any Books by J.K Rowling, including Harry Potter

Transphobic asshole and not that good of a writer.

9. Tolstoi's works

I'm sure he is great writer. Sometime when I'm old and grey I'll try reading War and Peace. But now, I'm too dumb for that.

10. Any of those celebrity authobiographies

I have my own life. I truly don't care and if I do I'll just watch some YouTube video instead of wasting my money. They're so painfully ghost written. Hate ghost written books, they can be so soulless. You can't really get an objective look at things bc the books are obviously biased. Look at that Prince Harry biography. You feel bad for him bc his wee-wee got frostbite without him actually addressing his partaking in the iraq war.

[hornyforpoetry]

Winter Reading Challenge

Every season I like to give myself a challenge to read. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to finish almost any of the ones I had in the autumn challenge (I'm not a procrastinator, I swear, I just have very little free time). This time, I tried to include in the list books from several fields, from prose to poetry, philosophy, theater and theater theory, biographies. There are many Russian authors in this list, it seems to me that they fit very well with the cold season. Let's hope that this time I will stick to reading more. Wish me luck!

From December 1st - February 29th (European calendar)

Leo Tolstoy – ”Childhood. Boyhood. Youth”

Leo Tolstoy – ”War and Peace”

Fyodor Dostoevsky – ”The Double” (1846)

Fyodor Dostoevsky – ”Demons”

Ivan Turghenev – ”Rudin”

Nikolai Leskov – ”Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and other short stories”

Anton Chekhov – ”Novellas and novelettes by Anton Chekhov”

Nikolai Gogol – ”Dead Souls”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – ”One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

Mikhail Bulgakov – ”The Master and Margarita”

Maxim Gorky – ”Mother”

Vladimir Nabokov – ”Lolita”

Marguerite Yourcenar - "A Coin in Nine Hands"

Marguerite Yourcenar - "A Blue Tale"

‌Franz Kafka - "The Metamorphosis and other stories"

Edgar Allan Poe - "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket"

John Edwards Williams - "Stoner"

Ovid - "Metamorphoses"

Dante Aligheri - "The Divine Comedy - Inferno"

Giovanni Papini - "Gog"

Plato - "Phaedo"

Aristotel - "Metaphysics "

Marcus Aurelius - "Meditations: Thoughts to Myself"

Immanuel Kant - "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Article Talk "

Niccolo Machiavelli - "The Prince"

Emil Cioran - "The Trouble With Being Born"

Peter Brook - "The Empty Space"

Jerzy Grotowski - "The Poor Theatre"

Antonin Artaud - "The Theatre and its Double"

Martin Esslin - "The Theatre of Absurd"

Salvador Dalí - "Diary of a Genius"

Vaslav Nijinsky - "The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition"

August Strindberg - "The Ghost Sonata"

William Shakespeare - "Titus Andronicus"

William Shakespeare - "Coriolanus"

Maxim Gorky - "The Lower Depths"

Racine - "Britannicus"

Goethe - "Gotz von Berlichingen"

Frank Wedekind - "The Spring Awakening"

Aeschylus - "The Oresteia" (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides)

[amtskind]

everyone who knows franz kafka probably has seen this photo of him, with him slightly smiling at the viewer, while remaining to look a bit lost. the picture was taken in 1908, making kafka 25 years old at the time.

but wait - the photo is cropped!

kafka is petting a dog! but there is more to this picture, it still remains cropped -

that's better, that's the one. it reveals kafka not only sitting next to a dog, but also a woman. the question remains - who is she?

the very happy looking woman is juliane "hansi" szokoll, a wine-bar-waitress, who was 22 years old when the photo was taken. not much is known about her relationship to kafka.

according to the german biographer and literary scholar rüdiger safranski, hansi was also a part-time sex-worker.

that would explain, where kafka might have met her - and also why she mostly was cropped out of the picture, to show kafka in the way, that people wanted him to see for a long time - innocent and somewhat mysterious.

[yozora-bunko]

Bungō Seichi Junrei, Asagiri Kafka

On June 19, 2020 - Bungō Seichi Junrei (『文豪聖地巡礼』) was released.

• Bungō -> great writer

• Seichi Junrei -> pilgrimage

As you might know, in Bungō Stray Dogs the relationships between the characters are very different from the irl authors' relationships, while it stays accurate in Bungō to Alchemist.

I thought that it could be interesting to translate the correlation tables that were in Asagiri Kafka's book so here you go:

Chapter I « KŌRO JIDAI »’S GREAT WRITERS SEEN BY IZUMI KYŌKA

Chapter II NATSUME SŌSEKI AND THOSE GENES

Chapter III KAWABATA YASUNARI AND COMPANIONS OVERCOMING GENERATIONS

Chapter IV NAKAHARA CHŪYA AND « BURAI »’S GREAT WRITERS

Chapter V BIOGRAPHIES OF ECCENTRIC WRITERS

If you can read Japanese, please support Asagiri Kafka by buying his book! I might translate some more pages in the future but definitely not the whole book. Feel free to DM me or comment which chapter you would like to read, or about which author you would like to know more!

9/01/2023: updated the slide for chapter III -> @haganeproductio rightfully nitpicked about the "shinkan kakuha" which should be romanized shinkankakuha. (or shin kankaku-ha but this romanization is a lot less used)

[comfortcomes]

@10000000fish tagged me to do 9 books i want to read this year ^_^ well technically i started one of these already but

not to be a tumblrina but i’ve read way more of kafka’s letters/diary/biographies than his fiction so i want to rectify that

and cal and i are going to book club the mary renault bio as tribute to our fujoshi queen… lol

if u want i tag @heart-time @unusedpreparatorydrawing @prayandsuspend @fdsbhalfk @hisaye 🫶

[mybeingthere]

Emilio Scanavino, (1922 - 1986, Italian)

Emilio Scanavino was born in Genoa (Italy).

His father, Attilio Scanavino, was an accountant and belonged to a family of merchants who had lived for two generations in Salto Oriental, in Uruguay. Attilio returned to Italy during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, and volunteered to fight in WWI. Once back from the front lines, he married Maria Felicina Sterla.

For years, he worked as an importer of coffee from Brazil for Italian buyers (Associazione Commercio Caffé Droghe e Coloniali), but was very interested in philosophy and esotericism, collecting books in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.

Emilio Scanavino, during his childhood – since his father was a victim of political persecution – could not play outdoors with other children, so he spent his days on the terrace of his home, building knick-knacks and small paper toys that he used to throw down in the courtyard below to the children freely playing there. He spent his days in the company of the doves living in the dovecote that his parents had built for him. This passion will remain with him, so much so that as an adult, he dedicated himself to collecting precious racing pigeons that he purchased in Belgium and in other cities abroad.

1934

For four years he attended the teacher training high school in Genoa with poor results.

His father would have liked to embark him on a cargo ship as a cabin boy to impart order and discipline on him, since Scanavino spent his time drawing and building “useless objects”.

1938

Asking his father for one last chance not to set sail, he expressed a desire to attend the Art High School in Genoa. This change stimulated his artistic abilities and aptitude, giving him a strong cultural spur. He approached the literature and poetry of writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, André Gide, Jacques Prévert, Marcel Proust, Jean Paul Sartre, Federico García Lorca, Franz Kafka and Dylan Thomas.

At this school he met Giorgina Graglia, who became his wife in 1946.

Continue https://www.archivioscanavino.it/en/info/biography

[vegance]

„Once he [Kafka] went to the Berlin aquarium … Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks, "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you any more." It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality—which was something almost completely foreign to him—he brought them out."

Max Brod - Franz Kafka: A Biography, translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1960), p. 74.

[corpse-of-bandersnatch]

Tagged by @ladyvean – Thank you, my lizard queen! <3

Last song I listened to: I'm listening to „Götterdämmerung“ by Zeal and Ardor right now.

Currently reading: „Vagina Dentata“ by Luci van Org, „Die Nonne“ by Denis Diderot and the third part of the Franz Kafka-biography, written by Reiner Stach.

Last watched: good ol' „Grave Encounters“

Currently obsessed with: a band named Coppelius. Obsessed is absolutely the right word. My god...

tagging: @glasmotte @unfortunately-unoriginal @wat-the-cur