K. Review
Calasso understands that "Kafka was a verist," or, as another translator might have put it: "Kafka was a realist." Always remaining repectfully close to the Kafka's text, Calasso finds its meaning not by abstracting, generalizing or inferring, but by reading closely the turns of phrase overlooked on first reading, repeated phrases, points made only once in all his works, and phrases crossed out in manuscript drafts. At this depth, it's plain that Kafka understood what's essential about the modern world, and that his cruel and phantasmagorical universe was simply this one. Calasso tells us nothing: he shows us what is already there and that is this: what Myth was to ancient times, Kafka is to our own. From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony comes one of the most significant books in recent years on a writer of perennial interest–a virtuoso interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka.
What are Kafka’s fictions about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Countless answers have been offered, but the essential mystery remains intact. Setting out on his own exploration, Roberto Calasso enters the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of Kafka’s work to discover why K. and Josef K.–the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial–are so radically different from any other character in the history of the novel, and to determine who, in the end, is K. The culmination of Calasso’s lifelong fascination with Kafka’s work, K. is also an unprecedented consideration of the mystery of Kafka himself.
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Customer Reviews
Forceful and fresh insights revive pleasure in endless unfinished novels - Antoine Boisvert - Salem, MA
Sometimes when faced with a difficult work of literature, it takes the right work of criticism to bring an appreciation of it to birth. Calasso provides that, or seeks to, in his work on Kafka's novels, whose fundamental plotlessness and lack of resolution can make one throw them across the room. I had always liked Kafka's short works, but thrown up my hands at the Castle, and never even attempted The Trial. Calasso is bringing me around.
Jun 14, 2010 18:00:05
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