I just recently finished reading Amerika or America by Franz Kafka. Which is quite interesting. According to the short afterward by Kafka's friend Max Brod he loved reading travel memoirs and was a big fan of Ben Franklin's diaries. The tale of travel to the United States is entirely fanciful, as Kafka never left Europe during his life.
Is it what one would call "Kafkaesque"? Certainly parts of it are. The part where protagonist Karl Rossman loses his job as a hotel lift boy demonstrates how far systems will go to destroy people who are trying to do well by them. The ending is surprisingly positive, though, and it seems Kafka would have developed it even more if he'd spent more time on the book.
2 comments:
It was long ago I read the only two of his novels I'm familiar with -The Metamorphosis and The Castle. I found them more than a little depressing.. I don't think I finished reading The Trial.
America sounds to be considerably more accessible to a reader whose tastes are similar to mine. Jer pointed out this morning that Kafka and Philip K. Dick have much in common with one another - both of them out of the mainstream during their lives and both offer absurdity as a way of dealing with life where nothing is quite what it seems.
It appears the governments invented by both authors have the goal of destroying history and the power to create it. We could name some governments that appear to have adopted that premise as a plan.
The two novels you've read I...might have. If so it was a long time ago, and mainly what I know of them is by reputation. I'll probably set to them in the future. Kafka is a lot of things but not long-winded, so it probably won't take me that long.
Amerika is probably less depressing, but reading about an absurd character who's continually getting kicked around can cause distress. Kafka may have been even more isolated than PKD because interbellum Prague didn't have anything resembling the midcentury science fiction scene Dick contributed to, although he was an odd duck in that context too.
It's a grim irony that so many people who fancied themselves part of "The Resistance" turned out to be so submissive.
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