Kafka was the Rage

Although not able to digest much more than food on Thanksgiving, I devoured and gorged on this book. Broyard shares his intimate life in Greenwich Village during the 1946 post-war timeframe, when everyone was still figuring out sex, philosophy, psychoanalysis. The writerly types were caught up in their words, some shunning real life for the safety of books, Broyard embracing all of it by dancing in Spanish Harlem and still writing for the Paris Review.

On his friend, Saul, dying of leukemia:
"He went into the hospital a couple of days after that. When I telephoned him, his mother was always beside the bed. Then one day someone else answered and said that Saul was no longer there. When I called his mother, she said, He's dead. That's the word she used. She pronounced both d's. "