I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

She became his lover and caused him to become interested in the Talmud. Opinions ranged from the notion that he satirised the bureaucratic bungling of a crumbling Austria-Hungarian Empire to suggesting that he embodied the rise of socialism. During a vacation in July 1923 to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea Kafka met Dora Diamant a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family.

He prepared the story collection Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) for print but it was not publiFranz Kafkad until after his death. His works such as "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis") Der Process (The Trial) and Das Schloss (The Castle) are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation physical and psychological brutality parent–child conflict characters on a terrifying quest and mystical transformations. He had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major impact on his writing and he was conflicted over his Jewishness and felt it had little to do with him although it debatably influenced his writing.