Zadie Smith, in Changing My Mind, offers a Kafka at odds with the myth: “Over six feet tall, handsome, elegantly dressed; an unexceptional student, a strong swimmer, an aerobics enthusiast, a vegetarian; a frequent visitor to movie houses, cabarets, all-night cafés, literary soirées and brothels; the published author of seven books during his brief lifetime; engaged three times (twice to the same woman); valued by his employers, promoted at work.”

Not quite the ascetic figure of Brod’s 1947 biography, the Kafka of myth and martyrdom. Louis Begley’s biographical essay, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, works against both the banality and the mystique. He writes:

Kafka’s life so imperatively commands our interest because his short stories and novels stand among the most original and greatest works of twentieth-century literature. Without them, there would be little to remember him for… Apart from moments of triumph, when a work he had completed met his superbly exigent standards, the only significant events in his private and humdrum life were occasional infatuations and the ups and downs of his relations with Felice and Milena… and, of course, the milestones marking the progress of his illness.

Drawing on Kafka’s letters and diaries, Begley reads against the inherited legend. The result is not a demystification exactly, but something quieter: a writer seen through daily life and contradiction, who wrote what he lived, however obliquely. Smith again: “But if we’re not to read Kafka too Brodley, how are we to read him? We might do worse than to read him Begley.”