Anne Tyler, John Updike, and Flannery O’Connor all made paintings and sketches in addition to writing fiction. As it turns out, so did Franz Kafka, who had a strong interest in art from his teens to his untimely death at age 40. What can you learn from looking at his works of art? Clearly, they don’t illustrate his stories. And, as Andreas Kilcher argues in this book, the sketches shouldn’t be understood as an extension of his writing. Instead, they tell us something different altogether. They provide evidence of his engagement with art, which gives us a new perspective.
Franz Kafka: The Drawings. Edited by Andreas Kilcher. Yale University Press, 2021. p. 218.