Will Self on Franz Kafka

With his nightmare visions of incomprehensible bureaucracies, petty authorities and social conformity, Franz Kafka summoned up the terrifying frustration and ceaseless anxiety of life and work in industrialised society. In this talk, award-winning novelist and broadcaster Will Self presents a guide to his work and thought.

The inspiration behind works as diverse as Catch 22, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Kafka’s imprint on culture is indelible.Scarcely known in his lifetime, his reputation was at once saved and bowdlerised by his friend and executor Max Brod, who refused to burn the unpublished novels, as requested by Kafka. This was a curiously apt fate, for Kafka’s genius lay in blending acute realism with flights of surreal and sometimes terrifying fantasy. One of the very few writers to become meaningfully adjectival, even in our increasingly poorly read era, his name remains synonymous with the very minatory essence of modernity.