Kafka frantically pursued Felice, and then he tried to escape her, Begley writes, “with the single-minded purpose and passion of a fox biting off his own leg to free himself from a trap”— a line with more than a little Kafka spirit in it. “Women are snares,” Kafka said once, “which lie in wait for men on all sides, in order to drag them into the merely finite.” It’s a perfectly ordinary expression of misogyny, dispiriting in a mind that more often took the less-traveled path. Apropos: having had it suggested to him by a young friend that Picasso was “a wilful distortionist” who painted “rose-coloured women with gigantic feet,” Kafka replied:

I do not think so…. He only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror, which goes “fast,” like a watch—sometimes.

Kafka’s mind was like that, it went wondrous fast—still, when it came to women, it went no faster than the times allowed.

I’m being devoured by mosquitoes and fear I’ll turn into a mosquito—but here’s a quick link to the review by Zadie Smith of a Kafka biography that removes the metaphysics from the man.