Terror Of Art

This is a book about Kafka's art. More specifically, it endeavors to describe and define his main narrative form-what I call the "dream narrative"-and trace its evolution from its beginnings to its culmination in The Castle. Kafka is an easy writer to appreciate, a hard one to understand; his antithetical art combines very great simplicity with tortuous complexity, starkness with obscurity. It is able to do so without falling into artificiality thanks to its natural truth of form, thanks to a form which is true to nature. And the nature to which it is true-the natural phenomenon whose truth Kafka makes his own-is the dream.