When Franz Kafka was twenty-five, living at home, working in an insurance office and beginning a first novel, he met a young woman from Berlin who was visiting his friend Max Brod's household in Prague. They exchanged addresses and became pen pals. Within a few weeks their relationship had deepened. By a few weeks later they had declared themselves a committed couple. But as Kafka ultimately let Felice Bauer know, the pieces could never fit. He was too frail in health, too fragile in mind, too perilously unbalanced in feeling. Writing every day, he poured out his doubts and aching needs. Felice wrote back nearly as often (her letters, subsequently lost, could not be included in the book). Five years went by as the letters flew back and forth. The two met occasionally and twice became engaged, but each time Kafka broke it off. His sexual drives had driven him to bordellos and pornography. He had an affair with a friend of Felice's whose son he may have fathered. Disorder had consumed him, even while writing the stories and novels that would make him famous. In 1917 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that would kill him.

Kafka's letters to Felice are painful. The reader must summon some strength to read them. But the intimacy to be found in them is breathtaking, poignant, and not easily forgotten. ( )

Read this alongside the Kafka bio.

Trying to decide which would have been worse; to have been Mrs Schopenhauer or Mrs Kafka. Close thing.