Where did this book come from and why was its author not completely in love with it?

I'd liked Kafka already but felt I'd had enough, knew enough of him... I had no idea. No idea that Kafka could pull such rabbits out of such hats, that a such limited world could be so complete, that a hero could be so sleepy, that slapstick could be performed with words alone and be SO funny, so useful, so correct.

I don't read this as allegory, warning, or vengeful depiction of a bourgeois cul-de-sac. I read it as pleasure, with pleasure. Kafka played. He enjoyed his mind. His mind was related to ours perhaps like a bonfire is related to a flashlight. They both illuminate, but one is a festive riot of nature that resolves into poignant embers while the other merely gets the job done with an occasional change of batteries. Well, I now need to read a biography of Kafka to see just how playful he was. Recommendations, anyone?

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A few days later, and I must append a note of gnawing dissatisfaction with the metaphor that I used to compare Kafka's mind to the hoi polloi's. The image of fire is completely wrong for Kafka, as it connotes organic passion, whereas Kafka's writing is uncannily clinical. His description of sex, for example, is perhaps the most dispassionate (and thus funny) as any that exists in the history of Letters: "...since the chair stood by the bed they stumbled over it and fell down. They lay there...she sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought...like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other's bodies, and then, helpless and disappointed, in an effort to catch one last bit of happiness, their tongues occasionally ran all over each other's faces. Only weariness made them lie still and be grateful to one another. Then the maids came up, 'Look at the way they're lying there,' one of them said, and out of pity she threw a sheet over them."

So -- bonfire, no. More like magnifying glass that inspects and distorts as it burns. I think what I was trying to get at with the lame bonfire metaphor is how everything is fodder for Kafka -- how the details simultaneously proliferate and are consumed by his almost monomaniacal but also incredibly playful (I insist) vision. And I stand by my assertion that his mind was in some way really different from most peoples'. Most people would be compelled to make a story out of any one of his beginnings. But he was compelled to begin again and again and again. He couldn't let anything definite happen, and he delighted in this neurosis, played with it. Even this collection of indefinite vignettes was too definite for him, so he abandoned it. And we look at it and impute meaning...