Recently I received a parcel from my parents. I opened it to find something surprising inside: a small red notebook I’d kept in late 2013 and early 2014, when I was living in Peru. Leafing through its pages, I was struck by two simultaneous sensations: first, the immediate, and thrilling, retrieval of old memories. (It wasn’t that I’d forgotten the overcast morning in the Urubamba Valley when my folklore-obsessed uncle told me the Quechua myth surrounding a nearby mountain; instead, flipping through the rain-streaked pages, I suddenly remembered that I remembered.) And second, melancholy: of knowing that I read so much more, saw so much more, did so much more than the pages record. If only I’d thought to write it all down.

“A person who has no diary is in a false position in the face of a diary,” writes Franz Kafka in an early entry in his sprawling Diaries, newly translated into English by Ross Benjamin. “When, for example, he reads in Goethe’s diaries ‘11 1 1797 busy at home all day with various arrangements’ it seems to him as if he himself had never done so little in a day.”

Reading these words not long after re-encountering my old notebook, I was struck by the brilliance of this simple rejoinder to my nostalgic melancholy: a diary, no matter how ‘complete’, can only ever have an oblique relationship to the mundane ordinariness of lived experience.

I first read Kafka in a college seminar in 2010. The professor—here I will imitate Kafka in referring to him as P.—had assigned us The Castle as well as the Zürau Aphorisms, a collection of 109 short texts that butt up against the shared border of inscrutability and delight. (A representative example, as translated by Michael Hofmann: “How is it possible to rejoice in the world except by fleeing to it?”) As we puzzled over the aphorisms, P. would quietly offer emendations to the translation—not, I think, out of any pedantic urge to correct Hofmann but rather to illuminate for us the twisting multivalence of Kafka’s language. I would scribble down these notes in pencil, quickly filling the book’s tiny pages.

I have been in Los Angeles since January, far from my book collection, the bulk of my notebooks, and my wife, all of whom live in Philadelphia. Spending the past few months with the Diaries kept pushing me back again and again to my memories of the little classroom where we wrestled over the book. Unable to access my old scribbles, I visited a bookstore in Echo Park, to see if they had a copy of the Aphorisms. I was pleasantly surprised to find a new, bilingual hardcover edition where they are presented in the original German, in a new translation by Shelley Frisch, and with running commentary by Reiner Stach, Kafka’s definitive biographer.

Yet I couldn’t help but feel, once I brought the book back to my sublet and cracked it open, that all the impressive armature of the edition might have been doing a little much. Leafing to aphorism 25—which Frisch renders “How can one take pleasure in the world other than when fleeing to it?”—I read in Stach’s commentary that it was “likely...prompted by the question of Palestine.” Knowing that Kafka was deeply immersed in contemporary debates over Zionism is, of course, both interesting on its own and pertinent to the text’s very existence: Brod fled to Palestine with Kafka’s papers when the Nazis marched into Prague. Yet what does knowing such a thing really communicate about such a line?

In his preface, Benjamin proposes that Kafka’s Diaries are less a coherent “werk” than a “shrift”—“writing as a fluid, ongoing, goalless activity.” It seems to me that this schema applies very nicely to Kafka’s work as a whole; in his stories and (unfinished, it’s worth pointing out) novels, very little gets done. Indeed, Kafka’s stories almost always take place in conditions where any notion of doing is made impossible. The triggering drama of “The Metamorphosis” is not Gregor Samsa’s sudden transformation into “some sort of monstrous insect” (in Susan Bernofsky’s 2014 translation) it’s his inability to get back to work.

Kafka himself got very little done in his truncated life. Born in Prague in 1883 to a German-speaking Jewish shopkeeping family, he attended German-language gymnasium and university and was employed as a clerk for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia from 1908 until shortly before his death from laryngeal tuberculosis in 1924, at age 40. Having published a few stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” and abandoned many more, he left his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod with instructions to destroy his “diaries, manuscripts, letters...sketches and so on” upon his death. (Stach, the author of a monumental three-part biography, claims that Kafka destroyed 90 percent of his archive, including huge portions of his diary, in the year leading up to his death.) Brod, infamously, refused his friend’s request and immediately set out editing and publishing Kafka’s unfinished stories and novels.

While the letters, diaries, and unfinished manuscripts of writers tend to form a shadow archive to be mined by curious readers after their deaths, in Kafka’s case, nearly everything carries with it the whiff of secrecy, inscrutability—and the illusory promise of a ‘hidden key’ that will cast light on the mystery of the scribbling tubercular insurance clerk who left behind such a monumental oeuvre. This image—“that of the saintly, prophetic genius, whose purity places him at an elevated remove from the world,” as Benjamin puts it—is one that Kafka’s contemporary interpreters and translators have tried hard to dismantle, especially in the years after Brod’s death, in 1968.

For Benjamin—who has previously translated books by Daniel Kehlmann, Joseph Roth, and Michael Maar—the image of Kafka as being as fundamentally mysterious and gnomic as the characters in his stories is simply a re-hash of Brod’s early marketing strategy; in the preface he notes in striking detail how Brod’s “Bowdlerized” edition of the Diaries (first translated into English in 1948) excised unflattering lines about Brod himself, a few bigoted comments regarding “eastern” Jews, as well as a few of the more overtly sexual entries—including any containing a hint of homoeroticism. They also condensed entries and indented them like paragraphs, giving a sense of coherence not contained in the original manuscripts.

Unlike Frisch and Stach’s Aphorisms, Benjamin restores to the Diaries their unsettled, unfinished form; rather than cluttering the pages with footnotes and glosses, Benjamin, or his editors, relegate to the end 76 pages’ worth of notes from the complete Tagebücher—enough, in other words, to decode most of the anonymized names, yet not quite enough to suggest what poor old Franz might have been thinking at any given moment.

Yet the pleasure in the Diaries, unlike in the Aphorisms, comes from the frequency with which Kafka himself flashes into presence on the page. We do not need Stach to describe contemporary coffeehouse arguments when we have the author himself writing down things like: “Failed attempt to write to E. Weiss. And yesterday in bed the letter was boiling in my head.” Here again—and again and again, throughout the 500 pages of surviving entries—is that old shibboleth, failure, which competes with nothing as Major Theme in the diaries. Kafka fails to enlist in the army. He fails to extract himself from the asbestos factory in which he’d become an investor. He fails to marry Felice Bauer—twice! And most of all, he fails to write.

But while he may have failed, in this case, to write the letter to Weiss (a friend of his and Bauer’s), in describing the failure he was creating the conditions for a new kind of literature. “Everything resists being written down,” he wrote down in his notebook a few entries later.

Most of the Diaries are taken from notebooks kept between 1912 to 1915; the remaining entries are spread across fewer than 100 pages, and stop abruptly in 1923, a year before his death. A year before that, he returned to his, Goethe’s—hell, every writer’s—old “Nothing” in an entry that says only that. The word isn’t even punctuated. Yet Diaries’ final entry suggests just how much power radiates through that “nothing”:

More and more anxious while writing. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hand of the spirits—this flourish of the hand is their characteristic movement—becomes a spear, turned against the speaker. A remark like this most especially. And so on to infinity. The consolation would be only: it happens whether you want it or not. And what you want helps only imperceptibly little. More than consolation is: You too have weapons.

In his biography, Stach mentions a few notes that Kafka—kept in silence in an Austrian sanatorium to shield him from the pain that tuberculosis wreaked on his larynx—would pass his interlocutors on slips of paper in the weeks before his death. These writings, these nothings, these weapons, were edited and published in German by Brod. They have not yet been translated into English.

The Diaries, in the end, are a record of a particular kind of failure, one that marks the very conditions of writing. “The family was sitting at dinner. Through the curtainless windows they looked out into the tropic night.” Then: “It was a warm quiet evening. In the moonlight the village street was completely” (no period). Then: “The family was sitting at dinner. Through the curtainless window holes they looked out into the tropic night.” It’s this Kafka that keeps Lydia Davis, for one, going back to the Diaries. In her marvelous essay “Revising One Sentence,” she writes that in the Diaries Kafka’s “complaints about his neighbors’ real noises on the other side of the wall became written fantasies about unreal people on the other side of the wall. A writer’s notebook becomes a record, or the objectification of a mind.” (The objectification of a mind: I wonder how many notebook lines Davis wrote out before she arrived at those words.) Reading Kafka begin, and abandon, so many stories is a thrilling reminder of the possibilities inherent in the attempt. ‘To try’ is necessarily ‘to fail’—until it isn’t.