SOURCE: “Brod on Kafka,” in The Nation, New York, July 12, 1947, pp. 47-8.

In the following review, Howe describes Brod's Kafka biography as “painfully self-conscious and unsatisfactory.”

Max Brod is in an impossible position. A lifelong friend of Kafka, he is himself a writer and is therefore expected to write a biography. But in the eyes of the world he has become a mere figure in the Kafka myth; he has lost independent existence. He is evidence. An ordinary citizen could perhaps tolerate such a relationship, but for a writer it is self-obliteration. No wonder then that, despite its value as a document, Brod's book [Franz Kafka] is so painfully self-conscious and unsatisfactory as a biography.

What we expect from Brod is recollection, portraits, conversation, detail, minutiae; a memoir of personal experience which may illuminate his friend's genius. We expect more from him than from Kafka's other intimates because...