#hasek_jaroslav

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Catch-22

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

(the lunacy of war, seen in a USAF base on a fantasy Mediterranean island during the second world war)

The Craziness of Command (you"ll laugh till you die)

Richard Hooker, M*A*S*H  (US doctors in Korea fighting insane conditions, boredom and gung-ho top brass)

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Peter George, Red Alert  (chain of command follies and failures triggers World War III)

Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny  (crew court-martialled for mutinying against insane World War II minesweeper captain)

Leslie Thomas, The Virgin Soldiers  (over-sexed, bewildered British conscripts in Far East)

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk  (World War I batman obeys every order, believes every lie, keeps out of trouble)

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity"s Rainbow  (what is top secret World War II establishment for? What is meaning of life? Should war (and sex) not be more fun than this?)

The World Gone Mad (laugh or cry, we live in an insane asylum)

Jersey Kosinski, Being There  (lame-brain gardener taken for political guru and saint)

Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?  (Sammy claws his way to the top; scum always floats)

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum  (nazism as an insane circus-parade watched by a gleeful, baby-brained adult)

Terry Southern, Candy  (virgin innocent abroad - neither innocent nor virgin for long)

Richard Condon, Mile High  (US power politics; a farcical orgy of sex, drugs, blackmail and murder)

Andrew Sinclair, Gog  (giant from past washed up in Scotland, travels to London, horrified at 20th-century "civilisation")

War Kills Our Young Men (war at the sharp end: brutal, unglorious, and pointless)

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front  (lives of four young men disrupted and ruined by brutality of World War I trench warfare)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage  (young volunteer horrified but exhilarated by battle conditions in American Civil War)

Len Deighton, Bomber  (meticulous planning for a bombing-run over Germany in World War II)

Neville Shute, Landfall  (breakdown of young pilot who sinks "one of ours" by mistake)

Mario Vargas Llosa, The City and the Dogs/The Time of the Hero  (farcical tragedy of young cadets in 1950s Peruvian military academy)

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead  (World War II US conscripts brutalised by conditions of service on a hopeless Pacific mission)

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KAFKA, Franz

Czech novelist and short-story writer (1883-1924)

In the 1920s and 1930s people regarded Kafka as an unsmiling neurotic who depicted the human condition as a bureaucratic hell without explanation or compassion: Kafkaesque' was a synonym for nightmarish'. Kafka, by contrast, always regarded himself as a humorist, in the line of such surrealist East European jokers as Gogol. Each of his novels and stories develops a single idea to ludicrous, logical-illogical extremes. In Metamorphosis a man has to cope with the fact that he has turned into a gigantic beetle overnight. The prison-camp commander of In the Penal Colony' is so eager to show off a newly-invented punishment-machine that he turns it on himself. In The Burrow' a creature designs a defence-system of underground tunnels so complex and so perfect that it becomes the whole meaning of existence: it engulfs its own creator. The central figure of The Trial (Der Prozess) is arrested one morning although he has done nothing wrong, spends the book trying to discover the charges against him, and is finally executed without explanation. It is easy to treat such tales as psychological or political allegories. But it is also possible to read them as jokes, grimly funny anecdotes invented just for the hell of it. Perhaps keeping his face straight was Kafka's best trick of all.

THE CASTLE  (1926) An ordinary, unremarkable man, K, arrives in a strange town to take up the post of Land Surveyor. He finds that no one is expecting him, that the town and the castle which dominates it are a labyrinthine bureaucracy where everyone is responsible only for passing the buck to someone else, and each favour done, each door opened, leads only to more confusion. K's efforts to reach the heart of the mystery, to be given some official confirmation of his existence, are doomed, hilarious and have the logic not of reality but of a very bad dream indeed.

Kafka's novels are The Trial, The Castle and America. His short stories have been published in one-volume collected editions and in shorter collections such as Metamorphosis and Other Stories and The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works. Kafka’s correspondence with the two women with whom he conducted complicated and soul-searching relationships gives fascinating insights into this most enigmatic of writers and has been published as Letters to Felice and Letters to Milena..

READ ON

The Trail

America (the story of a naive young German who goes to the USA thinking that its streets are paved with gold, and goes on believing it despite being cheated and betrayed by everyone he meets)

To The Trail : see also pathway

Echoing Kafka's humour : Jaroslav HaÜek, The Good Soldier Svejk Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Joe Orton, Head to Toe Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell

Echoing the idea of a 'Kafkaesque', nightmare society : Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller Alasdair Gray, Lanark George Orwell, 1984 Rex Warner, The Aerodrome

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