#kafka_franz

[whattoreadnext]

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

 more :Tags  Pathways  Themes & Places

[whattoreadnext]

ORWELL, George

British writer (1903-1950)

George Orwell' was the pseudonym of Eric Blair, In his 20s he worked for the Colonial Police in Burma (an experience he later used in the novel Burmese Days). He returned to England disgusted with Imperialism and determined never again to work for or support the system'. In fact most of his work thereafter was literary: articles, essays and books taking a jaundiced view of British society and attitudes. Commissioned to report on the industrial north of England, he wrote The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), an indictment not only of unemployment and poverty but also of the failure of idealists, of all political parties, to find a cure. Downand Out in Paris and London (1933) is a description of the life of tramps and other derelicts; Homage to Catalonia (1938) is a withering account of the failure of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. During the 1930s Orwell published three Wells-ian novels, about people dissatisfied with the constricting middle-class or lower-middle-class lives they led. It was not until 1945, when the second world war seemed to have blown away for ever the humbug and complacency which Orwell considered the worst of all British characteristics, that he published his first overtly political book, Animal Farm. In this Stalinist fairy story', pigs turn their farm into a workers' democracy in which all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others', and the rule of all quickly degenerates into the tyranny of the few. The success of Animal Farm encouraged Orwell to write an even more savage political fantasy, 1984.

1984  (1949) In the totalitarian future, Winston Smith's job is to rewrite history, adding to or subtracting from the record people who are in or out of Party favour. He falls in love -- a forbidden thing, because it arises from free will and not by order of the Party -- and is betrayed to the Thought Police. He is tortured until he not only admits, but comes to believe, that the Party is right in everything: if it says that 2+2=5, then that is so. The book ends, chillingly, with the idea that Winston has won the victory over himself: he is happy because he has chosen, of his own free will, to have no choice.

Orwell's 1930s novels are A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air. His essays, letters and journalism have been collected in four volumes in paperback.

READ ON

To the novels of the 1930s : Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists H.G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly

To 1984 : Franz Kafka, The Trial Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev see also pathway

Future-fantasies of a similarly bleak kind : Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess, 1985 (a right-wing riposte to 1984) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Yevgeni Zamyatin, We x

Mario Vargas Llosa, The City and the Dogs/The Time of the Hero (set in a Peruvian military academy, is that rare thing, an Orwellian political allegory which is also funny)

 more :Tags  Pathways  Themes & Places

[whattoreadnext]

The Trial

Franz Kafka, The Trial

(Josef K. is arrested and forced to fight - for his life - against charges which he is never told)

A Mad, Mad World (just because life is Kafkaesque, it doesn"t have to be serious)

André Gide, The Vaticans Cellars

John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

Richard Condon, The Final Addiction

Tom Sharpe, Riotous Assembly

Inside the Skull (making nightmares for ourselves)

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Bein

Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno

Paul Bailey, Peter Smart"s Confessions

Jersey Kosinski, The Devil Tree

Society as Hell (humans invent a society, which then goes mad)

Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Wyndham Lewis, Childermass  (first part of the Human Age)

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity"s Rainbow

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Trapped by the system (individuals caught like flies in the spiders" webs of circumstances they can"t control)

Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler"s Planet

Alejo Carpentier, The Chase

Max Frisch, I"m Not Stiller

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk

Joseph Heller, Something Happened

[blog-wandering]

Prague#czech_republic#sant_cathedral#kafka_franz#old_town_square#astronomical_clock#travel#marco_iaconetti_blogger_journalist_drone_pilot#remember_prague#instagram_photo_travel@marcoiaconetti (presso Old Town Square, Prague, Rep Czech)