Czech Books Anthony Northey: Kafka and the Geishas
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” The opening sentence of Franz Kafka’s story Metamorphosis is one of the most famous in world literature. But the writer himself will always be something of an enigma. Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and spent nearly all his life in the city, dying at just 41 in a sanatorium near Vienna. A Kafka symposium was recently held in the Czech capital and one of the most interesting talks was given by the US-born Canadian academic, Anthony Northey. For many years he has been trying to piece together details of Kafka’s biography and has also been researching into the way Kafka interacted with his home city, at a time when Prague was going through rapid and dynamic change. He has managed to challenge some of the many myths that have become both the blessing and the curse of Prague’s most famous literary son. When I met Anthony Northey, he began by telling me more about his research into Kafka’s Prague.
Franz Kafka
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