Franz Kafka

A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL
By Frigyes Karinthy
New York Review Books, 288 pages, $17.95

Frigyes Karinthy, in his day a well-known Hungarian humorist and writer, was in his favorite cafe in Budapest when he heard the roaring of a train that no one else heard. On subsequent evenings his hallucination repeated itself at precisely the same time. He developed blinding headaches, and he also began to go blind—very slowly.

His memoir A Journey Round My Skull, reissued this month by New York Review Books, covers his experience of mysterious symptoms; the diagnosis of a brain tumor; his travel to Stockholm to see a preeminent neurosurgeon; and the successful surgery to remove it. But the greater part of the book concerns his strange avoidance of the gravity of his problem. As if an inverted Kafka, Karinthy wanders from doctor to doctor, looking for one who doesn’t annoy him, receiving no firm diagnosis, making light of his symptoms, delivering himself occasionally of profound but disconnected observations and drifting slowly toward blindness and death without ever losing the breezy tone of a Viennese society reporter.  read more »