If Franz Kafka, whose arresting appearance we know so well from photographs, had looked like Ernest Hemingway or Homer Simpson or Boris Johnson—almost anybody other than Franz Kafka—the figure of a hopelessly complicated, alarmingly delicate, self-enclosed neurotic, whose quivering otherworldly sensitivity unfitted him to the trivialities of human intercourse, might not stand so firmly between us and him. The ears suggesting extraterrestrial ancestry, the “intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control,” as Philip Roth puts it. Even Kafka’s baby picture reproduced on a wall of the Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition “Franz Kafka” says, Uh-oh, here comes trouble.
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