A Master of Modernism

Oxford University Press are in the process of publishing new translations of Kafka. We reviewed Metamorphosis and The Castle last year. Now comes The Hunger Artist and Other Stories which combines some of his best-known short stories (Investigations of a Dog, The Great Wall of China, The Burrow, and The Judgement) with some of his quasi-philosophic aphorisms and earliest journalism. It makes a selection ideally suitable for readers who have not tackled this enigmatic  and completely original writer before.
The full review is here.

Modern Architecture: a review

This is a scholarly history of modern architecture which has gone through a number of editions and has been kept up to date with obvious enthusiasm from the author, who is an authority on the subject. Peter Frampton starts with three short chapters that give the historical background to the modern era. That is, the architectural thinking, urban planning, and the technological developments after 1750 that led to the twentieth century, when modernism began ... more >>

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 >>

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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 >>

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Common Reading - book review

Alternative titles for this collection of essays might be The Last Men of Letters, Critics and the Marketplace, or even (to choose the sub-titles of two other Stefan Collini books) Essays in History and Culture or Intellectuals in Britain - because it is largely a study of writers 1920-1960 who earned their living as journalists and critics in the world of literary magazines and journals. It's also a consideration of their readership, how they have been forced to change over the years, and the state of intellectual biography in the twenty-first century. He describes the collection himself as 'exercises in intellectual portraiture [and] the nature of the diverse public for whom these figures wrote, and ... the cultural traditions and institutional frameworks within which they operated'. The first half of the book is a series of literary portraits of critics and what he calls 'public intellectuals' - Cyril Connolly, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, E.H.Carr, E.P.Thompson, Perry Anderson, and even Roger Scruton... Read more >>

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Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Beckett's amazingly difficult yet consistent life, which was unrelenting devoted to creativity. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Beckett is a well-known author, but not much is generally known about his personal life. He avoided interviews and shunned publicity - even sending his publisher to collect his Nobel Prize. This short book isn't an attempt to deliver a full scale biography (that has already been done by Deirdre Blair, Anthony Cronin, and James Knowlson) but it offers a potted account of his life accompanied by the most original set of photographs that I have ever seen - some from his personal life, and others from stage productions... Read more >>

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Marcel Proust: an illustrated life

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Proust's strange life, and his unrelenting devotion to creativity. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Mary Ann Caws admits from the outset that with so many other excellent biographies of Proust available [by George Painter, Ronald Hayman, and William Sansom] there's no point in writing another. Instead, she produces an account of Proust which takes themes and motifs from his life as a starting point for meditations upon them - some of them not much longer than a single page, and others stretching out in more leisurely fashion to make well-informed reflections on the social context which gave rise to his work... Read more >>

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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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The Intellectuals and the Masses

This book has been around for a while now. I read it on the strength of having enjoyed John Carey's more recent What Good Are The Arts?. His basic argument is that with the rise of mass democracy and universal education at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, artists and intellectuals reacted with fear to this phenomenon and both denigrated the ordinary person and at the same time deliberately made their art more difficult to understand. None of the major figure of literary modernism escapes his charge: D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot are all quoted making remarks which are undemocratic, elitist, racist, and tainted with a supremacism which Carey traces back to Nietzsche. These attitudes are then extended to an intellectually snobbish dislike of the 'suburbs' which were built to house the ... Read more >>

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