The most common complaint among revisionist biographers and doting
critics of Franz Kafka is that, in the eighty-odd years since his
death, the deification of the writer has reduced his work to the
level of the aphorism. If Kafka has not yet found his way onto the
walls of every dentist's waiting room, the photograph of his stony
countenance and doleful eyes, so frequently invoked as a stand-in for
his vision of the world, sometimes seems to be everywhere else,
including the cover of novelist Louis Begley's recent book-length
biographical essay on Kafka, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My
Head. His stories are still read widely--less so his novels--but have
in the popular imagination been subsumed by a one-word slogan:
Kafkaesque. That grainy likeness is its logo.
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/provan/single?rel=nofollow>Link
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