Stephen Mitchelmore

Stephen Mitchelmore, always compelling and insightful, has a marvelous review of Reiner Stach's biography of Kafka, Kafka: The Years of Insight. Here's an excerpt from Stephen's review:

"While readers of The Years of Insight receive a rich and moving account of the pressures of one man's life in a certain time and place, the true authority of the biography is felt in what is glimpsed around the accumulated detail, and even more so in what gets lost: photographs taken with Felice Bauer ruined because she inserted the film back to front, the stash of notebooks written in Berlin confiscated by the Gestapo, the life not lived because it was ended prematurely by a disease that would soon be curable and, most of all, what happened to his friends and family years later. It is not an authority of power." -Stephen Mitchelmore

Read the entire review here: This Space.