I just spent the last three or four hours in one of the worst reading experiences of my life. Don’t get me wrong: The book was awesome. But it was so upsetting that, 30 minutes after finishing it, my heartbeat is still racing with horror and revulsion. And this during a year when I’ve read too many books about Nazi Germany, ancient and modern slavery, and 1100 pages of Sven Beckert on the history of capitalism. None of those reading experiences compares to the throbbing disturbance of this book.

So what is it? Elias Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial. It’s about Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer, to whom he was engaged, I think, twice, and how those letters provide the raw material for his masterpiece The Trial. I was inspired by a video of Vivian Gornick talking about these letters to read Canetti’s book, and now that I have, I can’t get rid of this feeling of ants crawling all over me.

On the one hand, Kafka comes off as the worst bad boyfriend in all of human history. That sounds really terrible and epic, right? And it is. He really is a monumental shit. Both self-serving and self-deceiving, all of it glossed with winks and nods to a grandiose form of self-knowledge. He easily could have driven the sanest person crazy. And it seems likely he did.

On the other hand, he comes off as so familiar and so banal. Canetti is a brilliant analyst of the letters and the literature, but even his pyrotechnical interpretations can’t salvage Kafka from seeming like one more silly and selfish heterosexual male on Sex and the City. Think Berger, but slightly more interested in Zionism and Palestine. Which Kafka was.

Usually, when we’re wrestling with a great artist who’s a terrible person, we’re dealing with terrible violence or racism or misogyny. Somehow or another, the largeness of the artistry is matched by the smallness of the person. That’s what makes those cases so vexing and troubling.

But that’s not what’s going on here, though Kafka did have major problems with women. He just seems like a very little person and a very emotionally stupid boy, prone to great fits of dysregulation in which all flight from reality is dressed up as a more intense knowledge of reality. We’ve all had some such episode or another in our own lives, particularly when it comes to relationships. It’s what anxiety does to all of us. Hopefully we outgrow those moments. Kafka never did. And though Canetti seems to think that makes Kafka more singular and interesting—he never learned from his own experiences—it actually makes him more familiar and boring. But no less a pest to women. Hmm, pest. Maybe that’s what Gregor Samsa really wakes up to: his being a pest to women.