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Kafka
This is a beautiful reading:
In the event, when they became engaged, Kafka would have to face the prospect of conjugality, and in Stach’s persuasive account, his fear of being sexually inadequate was a principal motive in his repeated centrifugal movements from his fiancée in Berlin. When the two met in a hotel in a town on the German-Austrian border at the end of 1914, Felice was evidently ready for sex, or she would not have permitted herself to go to a man’s hotel room, but Franz was not. What he did instead, astonishingly, was to read out loud to her, from the manuscript of The Trial, the episode "Before the Law." Stach tartly observes: "Was he not also standing before an open gate? And not entering. Instead he read her a story about entrances, doorkeepers, and waiting in vain."
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A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
And we all know how incredibly erotic “The Trial” was. Kafka’s wooing makes my awkward bachelor days look comparatively Valentino-esque.
Nice catch. Poor Franz.
Having in my youth perpetrated a parody of “Before the Law” in precisely these terms, I am now going to shut up.