Avant-Garde & Modernism Collection - Böcker

Though best known for his editing and posthumous publication of his friend Franz Kafka's writing, Max Brod was a major novelist in his own right. ""Tycho Brahe's Path to God"", widely considered his finest work and viewed by many as a small masterpiece, concerns the relationship between the great Danish astronomer and the younger, intellectually superior Johannes Kepler. Brod's representation of this complicated relation grew out of his acquaintance with the young Albert Einstein, reproduces his struggles with the Expressionist poet Franz Werfel, and strangely anticipates the most famous act Brod would ever perform: publishing Kafka's writings without his permission. As Brahe attempts to create a diplomatic compromise between the old Ptolemaic system of planetary motion and its modern, Copernican revision, Kepler discards the principle of compromise root and branch. Their conflict thus becomes an emblem of the struggle between a weakened tradition and a self-conscious modernity. The novel manages to convey the intimate, emotional reality of a seventeenth-century political conflict as well as the psychological, political, and artistic turmoil of Brod's own time. This revival of the richly allusive and deeply resonant ""Tycho Brahe's Path to God"" is a true literary event.

Franz Kafka was a self-conscious writer whose texts were highly if mysteriously autobiographical. Three giants of contemporary fiction - J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald - have all acknowledged their debt to the work of Kafka, both in interviews and in their own academic essays and articles for a general readership about him. In this striking feat of literary scholarship, Daniel Medin finds that the use of Kafka by Coetzee, Roth, and Sebald is similarly self-reflexive and autobiographical. That writers from such divergent national and ethnic traditions can have such unique critical readings of Kafka, and that Kafka could exert such a powerful influence over their oeuvres, Medin contends, attests to the central place of Kafka in the contemporary literary imagination.