The full review is
Showing posts with label Franz Kafka. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franz Kafka. Show all posts
24 April 2012
A Master of Modernism
The full review is
26 August 2009
Franz Kafka's The Castle
The Castle was Kafka's last novel, and like most of his others (except The Trial) it was never completed. Indeed, it ends abruptly, breaking off half way through a sentence. But it towers as an unfinished masterpiece over the rest of his work. Anthea Ball, the translator of this new edition from OUP, makes the case that The Castle is unlike The Trial because it is set in the countryside and it is mainly concerned with a village community. Others are likely to note that it has a very similar protagonist, with the same initial name (K) who seeks acceptance into the village and is condemned to failure in his attempts to gain admission to the Castle. This building dominates the entire locality and houses swarms of unseen officials and various bureaucrats representing authority in the absence of its real owner, who never appears...Read more >>
07 August 2009
Kafka's The Trial
The Trial was the only novel Kafka more-or-less completed during his own lifetime. Most of his other work is renowned for being fragmentary and incomplete. But even so, its chapters were kept in separate folders and he gave no indication of the order in which they were to appear. The parts were assembled and published by his friend Max Brod in 1925, the year after Kafka's death. It is a novel which seems to give early expression to the horrors of the modern world. It deals with the arbitrary nature of power threatening the freedom of the individual and crushing of every attempt to understand its workings. The novel opens with a sentence which has become famous - heralding the nightmare to come: "Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for one morning without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." This is the 'knock on the door' which was to become an everyday experience for millions in the years that followed ... Read more >>
19 July 2009
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Franz Kafka is one of the most original and idiosyncratic writers of the twentieth century. He published very little during his own lifetime; he lived for literature (in fact he said "I am literature"); he wasn't formally a great novelist or writer of short stories; and yet he put his stamp on literature to such an extent that his name has become an adjective - and we now speak of Kafkaesque situations and circumstances. These tend to be scenarios in which the individual is trapped in madly contradictory situations, confronted by bureaucratic and totalitarian forces over which he has no control. That's why Kafka's reputation soared in the 1930s and 1940s. He prophesied the sort of state which condemned individuals as guilty - but didn't tell them of what they were being accused. He spelled out the mad logic of the show trials long before they took place, and he is quite rightly regarded as a precursor of ... Read more >>
16 February 2008
Franz Kafka - an illustrated life
This short biographical study offers an introduction to Kafka's tragically short life and the formative influences on his work. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Kafka's own story is fairly well known. As he himself points out, he was born, went to school and university, then lived and worked within the radius of a few miles all his life. He had a passionate desire for independence, but lived most of the time even as an adult with his parents or his sister. He had a love-hate relationship with his father which dominated his life, and he took very little interest in the publication of his work, even though he was regarded by others as the most important writer of ... Read more >>
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