Charlie Tyson at Bookforum:
The complex nature of Kafka’s agony around work is made freshly discernible in Ross Benjamin’s new translation of the author’s diaries. By giving us a more bodily Kafka than has hitherto been available, Benjamin helps us sense the author’s pleasures and pains with greater clarity. As we turn the pages of the diary, we are reminded that the same man who professed that he was “made of literature . . . nothing else” also went swimming, took walks, visited brothels, and, when his digestive troubles lapsed, dreamed of forsaking his carefully masticated vegetarian diet to gorge himself on sausages and “eat dirty grocery stores completely empty.”
Kafka also looked at pornography, posed nude for another man’s sketch (“Exhibitionistic experience”), noted the “sizable member” bulging in a fellow train passenger’s trousers, and admired the long legs of two lovely Swedish boys, “so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.”
more here.