Conversations with Kafka

Gustav Janouch met Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of The Metamorphosis, as a seventeen-year-old fledgling poet. As Francine Prose notes in her wonderful preface, '¬Sthey fell into the habit of taking long strolls through the city, strolls on which Kafka seems to have said many amazing, incisive, literary, and per- things to his companion and interlocutor, the teenage Boswell of Prague. Crossing a windswept square, apropos of something or other, Kafka tells Janouch, '¬ÜLife is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one'¬"s personal experience. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.'¬"'¬ They talk about writing (Kafka'¬"s own, but also that of his favorite writers: Poe, Kleist, and Rimbaud, who '¬Stransforms vowels into colors'¬) as well as technology, film, crime, Darwinism, Chinese philosophy, carpentry, insomnia, street fights, Hindu scripture, art, suicide, and prayer. '¬SPrayer,'¬ Kafka notes, brings '¬Sits infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one'¬"s own existence.'¬