Poet — What To Us (cf. What, to us, is the 4th of July, asked Frederick Douglass) has his book soon — and friend, Lewis Freedman, who read at the inaugural Celansalon last November, has long had the idea to cull a book from sentences containing Kafka (or Er…)
At the beginning of her quietly wise review of Louis Begley’s The Tremendous World I Have Inside MyHead: Franz Kafka–A Biographical Essay, Zadie Smith uses this to good effect.
How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps:
It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.
A naked man among a multitude who are dressed.
A mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham.
Franz was a saint.
If you guessed Walter Benjamin, Milena Jesenská, Erich Heller, and Felice Bauer, respectively, you’re Lewis Freedman.
Smith’s review is worth reading well — there are still sentences, one learns, to write about Kafka — and you can do that here.
Predictably, my small quibble is a Walserian footnote to a footnote:
Brod championed many artists, including Leos Janácek, Franz Werfel, and Karl Kraus.
As is the fashion, Max Brod does not come off well in Smith’s–or Begley’s–portrayal.
But let the record show, that Walser was among those artists he helped: from the early days of Arkadia to Walser’s late prose pieces in the Prager Presse (Brod had introduced Walser’s work to the editor Otto Pick.)
Stumbling upon the paper doll Suhrkamp made for Robert Walser’s 125th birthday, one imagines there’s a cut-out Kafka in store for us. Fischer Verlag, for their part, is running a 
as much as I do?” This unlikely question, an allusion to 