Snail mail: you have to love it. Especially when it brings Franz Kafka
who was 'all alone in the bargain bin of the co-op bookshop at Newcastle Uni' (perhaps too gloomy for them there?)
Anyway, here he is, dropping in on the likes of Djuana Barnes, Stevie Smith, Gertrude Stein and Eve Langley. I think they'll all rub along all right.
He's a writer I'm unsure I've read. But I'm all for a bit of metamorphosis. And I like it that most of his work was published after he was dead - I'm sure that pleased him.
But I have read Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. That counts, doesn't it?
He bore a quotation: "I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
As a card-carrying melancholic, I can only agree.
