Happy Birthday Franz Kafka!

July 3, 2009

He lived almost his entire life with his parents.

His family’s apartment in the Jewish ghetto in Prague was tiny, noisy, and subject to the rule and whims of his tyrannical father. Kafka once noted, “I want to write and there’s a constant trembling in my forehead. I’m sitting in my room which is the noise headquarters of the whole apartment, doors are slamming everywhere. … Father breaks down the door of my room and marches through with the bottom of his bathrobe dragging behind him. Valli shouts through the foyers as if across a Parisian street, asking if father’s hat has been brushed. The front door makes a noise like a sore throat … Finally, father is gone, and all that remains is the more tender, hopeless peeping of the two canaries.”

In that noisy claustrophobic apartment with his parents and three sisters, Kafka would hypnotize himself to get in a frame of mind to write. He said, “Writing … is a deeper sleep than death … just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my desk at night.”

–from The Writer’s Almanac for July 2, 2009

***

Sigh.

I’m slowly working my way back into my book after a little hiatus. I’d like to say I can’t be dragged from my desk, but I’m easily distracted. Still, I forge on!

Got a lovely email from Lee who inspires me to no end:

You will finish your book.  I know you will.  We want there to be the sense of time passing in it — when books take a long time to write, I think the readers can really feel that.  Take your time with it.   I love novels because they have in them everything the author has in his brain at that time — I really do believe that.  What you know about people, about the world, about geography, about talking and language.  Novels sort of use up everything that you have.

What a gem. (by the way, his book will be out from Kensington in the near future!)