After Gregor sleeps for several hours, his sister, Grete, tries to bring him one of his favorite foods. He finds he no longer has an appetite for foods he once loved; he is more attracted to rotting food. Grete carefully handles any dishes she brings to or takes from Gregor’s room. Despite the relatively short distance between Prague and Berlin, Kafka and Bauer would meet only a handful of times, become engaged twice and never marry. But their correspondence of hundreds of letters – which finished when Kafka wrote the last letter in 1917 and only came to the world’s attention in 1955, when Bauer sold his letters to her – is one of the most poignant chronicles of the human urge to share ourselves, while foregoing the vulnerability that such intimacy creates. Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words Kafka, in a 1912 letter to Bauer Milena Jesenská, Πράγα, τέλη Μαρτίου 1922, συνδέει τα φαντάσματα - δαίμονες με την επιστολογραφία και κατ' επέκταση με όλες αυτές τις χάρτινες σχέσεις τις οποίες αδυνατούσε να διαχειριστεί στον πραγματικό κόσμο (αυτόν τον οποίο αντιπροσωπεύει η Felice): Es el 13 de agosto 1912 y Franz Kafka asiste a una velada íntima en la casa de su amigo y albacea Max Brod.

Kafka, along with Rilke (I love me a good turn-of-the-century German), was the first "serious" writer I fell in love with (though for the record you'll never see me denigrating a good YA, fantasy, or sci-fi). I came across A Hunger Artist when I was about 10 or 11, and I was captivated. He gets it I thought-- he puts into words what I feel but can't explain! Along with In the Penal Colony I still think Hunger Artist is the greatest short story ever written.If we value our lives, let us abandon it all… I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with. In it, he said, "In the likelihood that you no longer have even the remotest recollection of me, I am introducing myself once more: my name is Franz Kafka, and I am the person who greeted you for the first time that evening at Director Brod's in Prague, the one who subsequently handed you across the table, one by one, photographs of a Thalia trip." Erratic letters Kafka ορισμένες φορές έχανε τον έλεγχο των συναισθημάτων του, στην προκειμένη περίπτωση είναι η επιτηδευμένη σοβαροφάνεια του εργασιακού του περιβάλλοντος αυτή που πυροδοτεί την έκρηξή του: Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?

Perhaps happiness, in Bauer's eyes, was marriage and parenthood. This starkly contrasted to Kafka, who sought to stoke the flames of his inner torment through writing. Sin darse cuenta al principio no nota que hay una dama sentada allí. Viene de Berlín y se llama Felice Bauer. Se produce así el primer encuentro entre Franz y una mujer que lo llevará hasta los rincones más recónditos del amor.The discomfort of this wildly disorienting bidirectional pull is what 29-year-old Franz Kafka articulated in a beautiful and heartbreaking letter to Felice Bauer, a marketing rep for a dictation machine company whom the young author had met at the home of his friend and future biographer Max Brod in August of 1912. Young Franz and Felice immediately began a correspondence of escalating intensity, with Kafka frequently exasperated — as was Vladimir Nabokov at the start of his lifelong romance with Véra— over his beloved’s infrequent and insufficiently romantic response. Over the five-year course of their turbulent, mostly epistolary relationship, they were engaged twice, even though they met in person only a few times. During that period, Kafka produced his most significant work, including The Metamorphosis. Five hundred of his letters survive and were posthumously published in the intensely rewarding and revelatory Letters to Felice ( public library). I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you.” La editorial Nórdica ha publicado un volumen realmente maravilloso y muy completo, a partir de una investigación concienzuda y seria en una edición de más de ochocientas páginas. Lo que más me gusta de Kafka es las ganas que me hace venir de escribir. Pocos escritores lo consiguen. No se trata de que escriban bien. Nabokov y Dostoievski, otros de mis dos escritores favoritos, no me hacen venir ni el más débil deseo de escribir: todo lo contrario, me apabullan con su perfección y me convencen de que no vale la pena intentarlo. Pero no es que Kafka escriba mal. Por supuesto. Es por lo que cuenta y por la intensidad con la que lo hace. Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature.