As with Kafka’s aphorisms, so with his brief parables. The parables, Walter Benjamin wrote, are “never exhausted by what is explainable; on the contrary, he took all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings.” Whatever these precautions may have been, they were inadequate, for the works of Franz Kafka—apart perhaps only from the Bible and the works of Shakespeare—may be the most relentlessly interpreted, if not overinterpreted, in the modern world.

The September 7, 2012, issue of The Times Literary Supplement ran a review by Gabriel Josipovici of several recent books on Kafka. Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, by Saul Friedländer, is another strong entry in the derby. Friedländer is by trade not a literary critic but a historian. His affinity for Kafka is historical and personal. Like Kafka’s, his family, German-speaking and Jewish, originated in Prague. His father went to the same university Kafka did, though some 15 years later. As Kafka lost his three sisters, so did Friedländer lose his parents in Nazi camps.

Friedländer is well aware of the competing theories about the meaning of Kafka’s small body of work, which includes three uncompleted novels, some two dozen substantial short stories, an assemblage of parables and fragment-like shorter works, diaries, collections of letters (many to lovers whom he never married), and the famous Letter to His Father, which he never sent. Friedländer’s method in this short book is to weave back and forth between the life and the work in an attempt to explain Kafka’s significance. He does not doubt Kafka’s greatness, though he resists explaining in what, exactly, it resides.

His own view is that Kafka was “the poet of his own disorder.” Friedländer writes, “The issues torturing Kafka most of his life were of a sexual nature.” Although he doesn’t say so explicitly, he appears to believe that Kafka was a repressed homosexual—that the shame and guilt Friedländer mentions in his subtitle were chiefly over Kafka’s hidden sexuality. He offers no clinching proof, and at one point goes so far as to say, “It is highly improbable that Kafka ever considered the possibility of homosexual relations.”

Yet in Kafka’s stories, Friedländer finds, “there is a secret to be uncovered, something that the protagonist attempts to hide. Doesn’t this … bring us back to Kafka’s constant efforts to hide his sexual leanings?” In the unending critical Easter-egg hunt for the secret meaning in Franz Kafka’s fiction, Friedländer has retrieved the gay egg.

At one point Friedländer remarks on Kafka’s interest in young boys. (Death not in Venice but in Prague?) At another he notes, “Kafka’s representation of women is grimacing at best.” At still another he mentions a youthful “homoerotic” interest in friends. In “A Country Doctor,” a wound in the side of a boy suppurating worms is, Friedländer agrees with another critic, symbolic of the vagina. Ah, we sleep tonight; criticism stands guard.