TLS on The Riddles of Kafka

...So too it is with biographers. They prefer the working hypothesis that the life is a decipherable enigma, not an insoluble mystery: anything else lets the curiosity, the ambition to want-to-know-exactly go to sleep too soon. In a related case, the Italian Germanist Giuseppe Bevilacqua has shown how far one can get with such a hypothesis. For decades he has studied the late poems of Paul Celan, to the common reader as opaquely unintelligible as most pieces by the writer from Prague. Under Bevilacqua’s expert scrutiny, that reads the life and work together, these dark forms bloom into a confession, coded in a private language, from which even the timing of Celan’s long-planned suicide can be inferred.