Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka

Mark Harman (Translator)
Schocken Books Inc 2008, Hardcover, 336 pages, £15.76

Brod named it thus because the novel is set in a Kafkaesque version of early 1900s America, although there are so many oddities about it that it feels just as much like Kafkaland as his other novels. There are obvious errors of research, like the Statue of Liberty holding a sword rather than a torch, and the Brooklyn Bridge joining New York to Boston. None of which, it should be clear to anyone with half a brain, matters a jot.

The opening chapter of the novel – The Stoker – was one of the few pieces of work that Kafka published during his lifetime. It introduces us to Karl Rossmann, a refugee from Europe, sent to America by his parents for getting a housemaid pregnant. In the opening pages, as the ship arrives in New York harbour, he realises that he's left his umbrella in his cabin, and so leaves his suitcase in the care of a stranger in order to retrieve the brolly from below. He gets lost and bumps into the stoker, who is sick of mistreatment at the hands of Schubal, his superior. They end up in the captain's cabin, where Karl launches a vigorous defence of the man he has just met. It turns out that his uncle is present, and has come to install him in a life of extreme comfort.

Full abstract see amerika-the-missing-person-by-franz-kafka

Elizabeth Costello

This is not a likeable book. I admire Coetzee’s writing a great deal, but Elizabeth Costello never reaches the heights of much of his other work. It has a highly unusual structure, composed of obviously novelistic sections mixed with thinly veiled essays (thinly veiled because they are given by the protagonist as lectures).

J M Coetzee

Vintage 2004, Paperback, 240 pages, £8.99

One of these lectures is highly, and I mean highly, controversial. It advances an argument that suggests a moral equivalence between the Nazi death camps and abattoirs. I have to say that I find it utterly, utterly repugnant. It actually made me very angry, in a way that very few books ever have. This isn’t like reading some link-baiting right-wing attention whore controversialist online: Coetzee is a regular literary prize-winner, is highly intelligent, as anyone who has read his criticism will immediately acknowledge, and possesses a fine human sensibility, yet it’s clear that he means what he says here. Coetzee is fairly well-known as a supporter of animal rights, which I suppose I can just about respect, but this argument is so repellent that I find it taints the entire book.

Full abstract see  elizabeth-costello

Nemesis

 

Critics seem to agree that Philip Roth’s recent novels are disappointing compared to his more formally daring earlier work. I thought The Humbling was just that: the humbling of a great writer, stooping to writing well below his brilliant best, but I’ve liked Exit Ghost, Everyman and Indignation more than most readers whose views I’ve read.

Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape 2010, Hardcover, 304 pages, £16.99

Roth is keen on multi-book schemata, and we now discover that Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling and Nemesis itself belong to a group that Roth calls Nemeses. Of these, Nemesis has the most in common with Indignation. Again, Roth’s story deals with a young Jewish man in a historical context. In Indignation, it is the Korean War that dominates, whereas here it is WWII.

Full Abstract see nemesis-by-philip-roth

Night Games

John Simon (Foreword)
Ivan R Dee, Inc 2008, Paperback, 288 pages, £9.99
Schnitzler is probably best known in the English-speaking world as the author of Dream Story [Traumnovelle], the book that Stanley Kubrick adapted as Eyes Wide Shut. While it’s not a disastrous failure as Kubrick’s film was, it’s no masterpiece either. It and the other stories here are somewhat melodramatic psychological pieces that carry with them a distinctive air of early 20th century Vienna, like heavy, musty curtains. Here the similarity is with Joseph Roth, although the stories lack Roth’s humour and lightness of touch.

Full abstract see : 26 Books

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