The Sons (Schocken Kafka Library (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: A Letter to my Father
Review: A Letter to my Father by Franz Kafka is a look into the mind of one of the most talented (but also unhappy) writers of the 20th century. It's a very personal account of the relationship between Kafka & his father, his strong, controling, tough father who was the main figure who influenced Kafka's life & way of thinking. Franz Kafka talks with great pain in this 'letter' about his childhood years & how his father controlled everyone in the household, how the writer's own personality was shaped & molded by this one relationship. After reading this letter, the reader is closer to understanding the person that wrote "Metamorphosis" & "The Judgment".

Rating:
Summary: Daddy Dislikes My Diet
Review: What happens when one imposes meat-eating on the other? What happens when the one doing the imposing happens to be your own father? And what happens when such carno-terrorism--to borrow from Jacques Derrida--becomes allegorical, representative of an inability to speak? In "Letter to His Father," Franz Kafka (a self-championing vegetarain harboring something akin to a body dismorphic disorder) coughs up a catalog of paternally-driven injustices and imagines a gastronomic utopia inimical to Daddy's sadistic table regime. Often overlooked, "The Letter to His Father" belongs right up there with Kafka's other canonized marvels. Go ahead and chew on it for a while.