Here's the full quote & where to find it:
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound
and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up
with a blow on the head, what are we reading for? So that it
will make us happy, as you write? ... But we need the books
that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like
the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being
banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A
book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my
belief." (Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak, January 27,
1904)
That's pretty hard-boiled, I believe. But then don't forget
Ralph Waldo Emerson who said literature had to be
"blood-warm" for it to matter. Emerson could be hard-boiled.
I forget the title, but he wrote an essay about death shortly
after the death of his son. Folks at the time thought there
was something weird in his "attitude", if I 'member
correctly.
And for the real aficionados, check out the 19th journalist
(& fiction writer extraordinaire) Lafcadio Hearn's
newspaper account of a murder in 1870s Cincinnati, Ohio,
where the body is discovered in the furnace.
Best wishes
Frederick Zackel
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