The preface also makes much of the rounder and more embodied Kafka that appears in this complete form, “[his] complex sexuality and all-too-human impulses, ambivalences and shortcomings. ”Again, the critical apparatus of this “critical edition” lets the reader down: There are no entries for circumcision, gonorrhea, prostitution, sex work, or tuberculosis (the disease that killed him), although Kafka indeed recounts his observations, fears, and experiences with all of these, along with what we’d today call “an eating disorder.” The only way to find something is to stop looking for it and read on.

The joke is too obvious: The experience of reading this new edition is Kafkaesque.

The fragmentary elegance of the midcentury diaries has been transformed into something weird, inexplicable, and monstrous: A hypertrophied collector’s item adorned with a single art deco hieroglyph. Ross Benjamin faults Brod for having “presented the diaries to the extent possible in the guise of a Werk, a cohesive and fixed work, rather than Schrift, writing as a fluid ongoing goalless activity.” But the paradox of schriftiness is that when it’s bound up and published as a book, it is transformed into Werk. Plus, anyone with a scholarly interest in Kafka would be able to read him in the original German.

If the earlier sin of middlebrow Kafka reception was making him out as just another existentialist author (“He is assimilated into an established trend of thought while little attention is paid to those aspects of his work which resist such assimilation,” sniffed Adorno), the contemporary Kafka, nearing the centenary of his death, has been reinterpreted according to the middlebrow progressive narrative of our era: Kafka is a “workshopping” auto-fictionist from the wrong place at the wrong time! This is not the Kafka whose work Walter Benjamin appreciated as “a sickness of tradition”—both of European literature and Jewish mysticism—but merely a less fortunate forerunner of a tendency accomplished most recently in Karl Ove Knausgaard and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux. The diaries are the place where fiction and reality sit literally side by side, bleed into each other, and are largely indistinguishable; all is resolved into text. Kafka comes back into domesticated view as a kind of late avant-garde conceptualist before it was cool, the writer committed to a mystical biological process—the act of writing. Actually, this vision isn’t so far from the earlier middlebrow existential Kafka: i.e., writing being simply what the writer does, whether it’s an enumeration of bowel complaints, the account of a doomed flirtation with a married actress, four versions of an opening to what will eventually become an unfinished story, or a relatively clean draft of the opening chapter of the novel The Missing Person that the now much maligned Brod had the genius to market to the world as Amerika.

Here indeed is a Kafka for our time. The author who imagined himself a circus freak displayed in a cage for all the world to see in The Hunger Artist and as a speaking ape in Report to an Academy was only unfortunate to have died before the advent of “Authortube” videos in which “the artist” cheerily narrates her “writing process” as she turns out another neatly tuned piece of genre fiction for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing algorithm in the hopes of one day landing a contract with Schocken’s parent company.

But “process,” as reading Kafka always reminds us, also has another meaning in German: trial. We cannot banish the artist’s suffering by reframing him or her, nor can that suffering be redeemed by the ritual of exhuming Kafka only to rebury him with full honors inside a leaden, coffinlike box of a book.

Despite all its unintentional distortions in the name of completeness, the new Kafka diaries, just like the older ones, offer plenty of reminders of the author’s true gifts. Kafka’s genius doesn’t lie in his unhappiness and alienation—my aunt was right about that part. What stands out about Kafka is his aliveness on the page, an aliveness achieved by very few writers before or since. The key to that aliveness comes from his devotion to gesture, to bodies in motion and at rest, and it derives from his love of the theater, extensively chronicled in the earliest notebooks. Here are the first three entries: “The spectators stiffen when the train passes,” “‘Whenever he ahsks me’ the ah broken free from the sentence flew away like a ball in the meadow.” “His seriousness is killing me. His head in his collar, his hair arranged immovably around his skull, the muscles at the bottom of his cheeks tensed in place.” Whether it’s stiffening, flying, or tensing, every sentence quivers.

When this observation of gestures and bodies matures, it produces writing that even animates mental activity, like this later entry from 1914 on reading Strindberg, “I don’t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast. He holds me on his left arm like a child. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I almost slip off, but on the eleventh attempt I sit there firmly, feel secure, and have a wide view.”

Is this a parable? A metaphor? One might as well ask that question about a modern dance. Every page of Kafka, whether edited and arranged by Brod, or Ross Benjamin, or filtered through squadrons of translators, offers these irrepressible glimpses of action. On watching a bad play: “All that remains of the 2nd act is the delicate neck of a girl which is stretched and tensed from shoulders clad in reddish brown between puggy sleeves to the small head.” From there, it’s a quick jump to the concluding sentence of “The Metamorphosis,” when Gregor Samsa’s sister finally leaves their cursed apartment, boards a tram, springs to her feet and “stretches her young body.”

With the intuition of the best critics, Walter Benjamin understood this immersion in movement to be the signature of Kafka’s style, the essence of the writer, without ever even having laid eyes on the diaries or read his gossipy entries on his friendship with Max Brod. “Each gesture is an event, one might even say a drama in itself. The gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event.” And, later, “Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset; rather the author tried to derive such a meaning from them in ever changing contexts and experimental groupings.” It’s in this restless, vivid experimentation that Kafka continues to speak to us, transcending and resisting each and all of the avant-garde and philosophical movements he was adjacent with and later assimilated into: surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, theosophy, Jewish mysticism, and now, the latest of these and probably not the last, post-literary auto-fictional conceptualism.