Books: Kafka's Trials

THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA, 1910-1913 (345 pp.)—Edited by Max Brod—Schocken ($3.75).

In 1910, when Franz Kafka was 26, he began keeping a diary. His personality was already obsessed by anxieties that he never shook off, and his writing was a presentiment of his later books. These diaries are more than a personal record; they seem to illuminate large areas of modern life and literature. Nothing quite like them has appeared in this century.

By writing "all my anxiety entirely out of me" and by jotting down whatever transient impression or narrative fragment entered his mind, Kafka hoped to achieve an emotional catharsis....