Wood, Michael. "Double Thought." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS November 20, 2008.

Kafka, Franz. The Office Writings. Ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg and Benno Wagner. Trans. Eric Patton and Ruth Hein. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Where did Kafka learn to think like this? A case could be made that he found his training not in his intricate psyche or in his horrified commitment to writing – ‘the service of the Devil’, he called it – but in his day job at the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance. Born in 1883, he trained as a lawyer, worked briefly for an Italian insurance company in Prague, the Assicurazioni Generali, and then in 1908 took a position with the institute, where he remained until he resigned on grounds of ill-health in 1922. He died in 1924. We may not believe, as we are told in the preface to The Office Writings, a selection from his legal and clerical work, that ‘much of Kafka’s greatness . . . is owed to his office job,’ but we can certainly agree that anything we learn about his job will strengthen ‘our sense of the conditions under which Kafka accomplished his nocturnal writing’ – the writing he did, that is, when he got home from the office. The editors of this volume are understandably eager to make literal, referential connections between Kafka’s office work and his fiction, and their texts of choice are ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘The Great Wall of China’, Amerika and The Castle. But their real point, and the real interest of this book, is rather different, and hinges on the idea of the Kafkaesque. We follow Kafka through reports and claims and arguments and petitions concerning building trades, wooden toys, quarries, farms, automobiles, trade inspections, risk assessments, accident prevention, the effects of the war on insurance premiums and practices, what to do about the apparitions the war has thrown onto the city streets: ‘men who could move ahead only by taking jerky steps; poor, pale and gaunt, they leaped as though a merciless hand held them by the neck, tossing them back and forth in their tortured movements.’ This is a pretty gripping image, but I can’t pretend the texts as a whole make for lively reading, or that they are full of secret literary treasures. They are dense, detailed, local, and they hold your (or my) attention because they really do give you a sense of consuming office work, a set of tasks where the spectre of boredom and a necessarily intense concentration go hand in hand. This is very much how Kafka, in his letters, talks about his job; but he was also, as the editors insist, often proud of it. He complained about it incessantly, but he took it seriously and he did it well. If he was just coasting, as one of his officials might say, he wouldn’t have complained so much. And reading these office writings I began to wonder whether the Kafkaesque is not, as the OED tautologically says, the name of a ‘state of affairs or a state of mind described by Kafka’, but rather a form of strangeness that is more ordinary than we think. We call it strange because we want it to be strange. Kafka didn’t simply describe it, and he didn’t invent it. He blew its cover, and more important still, revealed its alarming frequency. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n22/wood01_.html.