Nicholas Lezard has narrated this article for you to listen to.
How do you see Franz Kafka? That is, how do you picture him in your mind’s eye? If you are Nicolas Mahler, the writer and illustrator of a short but engaging graphic biography of the man, you’d see him as a sort of blob of hair and eyebrows on a stick. The illustrations of Completely Kafka may look rudimentary, but they work. In fact they’re similar in style to the doodles Kafka himself would make in his notebooks.
If you were Kafka, you’d see yourself as a spindly man, head on desk, leaning on your hands, arms bent, in a posture of defeat and exhaustion. That image is chosen for the cover of a translation by Mark Harman of Selected Stories. But if you are Penguin, publishing a new edition of the Diaries, you’d use the photograph (reproduced) of Kafka in his late thirties, standing in a Prague square, eyes hidden by his hat’s brim but with an amused smile on his lips.
Photographs of Kafka are always of a young man, since he died of tuberculosis at the age of 41. (His death was in 1924 – hence the present glut of books by and about him.) The Prague photograph is well chosen, because it reminds us that there is humour in Kafka, and that he wasn’t solely the prophet of a century of dehumanisation. And at least none of the books I’ve seen have a drawing of a giant beetle on the cover.
Kafka’s early work wasn’t quite as sui generis as you might imagine.
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