20th Century German Literature - Literary Criticism

K

Name: K
Author: Roberto Calasso
ISBN: 9781400076123

by Roberto Calasso, Geoffrey Brock

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Overview

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.

Synopsis

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.

The New Yorker

Kafka’s fiancée once wrote to him that she had taken his handwriting to a graphologist, who detected “artistic interests.” Kafka wrote back, disdainfully, “I don’t have literary interests. I’m made of literature, I’m nothing else and can be nothing else.” For such a writer, the erudite Italian novelist and publisher Calasso is the ideal critic. Under his patient gaze, the inner connections of Kafka’s writing emerge; for instance, he sees the mysterious world of “The Castle,” encountered by the land surveyor, K., as a sort of limbo into which Josef K., from Kafka’s earlier novel “The Trial,” has fallen. An elegant writer, Calasso is particularly attuned to the strong erotic undercurrents in Kafka’s writing and is suitably wary of finding any overarching philosophy.

About the Author, Roberto Calasso

Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch; The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of France’s Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger; Ka; Literature and the Gods; and The Forty-Nine Steps.

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Editorials

The New Yorker

Publishers Weekly

Calasso's study is a milestone not just in the ever burgeoning literature about Kafka, but in literature itself. This remarkably elegant essay gains its intellectual authority from Calasso's tone: he's amazingly well read, without being a factotum of any particular discipline. Elias Canetti remarked that Kafka was, as a writer "so utterly himself" that the critic "must, even at the risk of seeming slavish, adhere as closely as possible to his [Kafka's] own statements." Calasso follows this advice. Among the insights into The Castle that make the first four chapters a must for interested readers of that work is the way in which Calasso sees K. as a continuation of Josef K, the hero of Kafka's earlier The Trial. "The Castle," Calasso claims, "is Josef K's bardo" ("the intermediate state" in the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Calasso is so intimate with the texts, including the diaries, short stories and The Trial, that his voice sometimes emerges uncannily from the texts themselves, as though he were one of those mysterious exegetes that Kafka loved to put in his stories. Particularly astute is Calasso's observation that the image of the assimilated Jew runs through the novels like a great latent anxiety dream, leading outward, to Kafka's prophetic sense of the insecurity of the Jews in Central Europe, and inward, to the household of Kafka's father. Kafka has had marvelous interpreters in the past, including Walter Benjamin, Canetti and Maurice Blanchot. Without exaggeration, Calasso (Literature and the Gods) belongs in this elevated company. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Much as K. stands before the law in that famous scene in Kafka's The Trial, Calasso here stands before the mysteries of Kafka's writings, trying to gain entrance. Drawing on Kafka's diary entries and performing dazzling close readings of The Castle, The Trial, and selected short stories, Calasso (Literature and the Gods) traces Kafka's literary lineage from Dickens to Dostoevsky and reveals the many layers of meaning that make up the enigmatic writer's universe. Calasso examines themes ranging from the nature of the stranger or outsider to the way of women in Kafka's fiction. Thus, "the outsider, the stranger, the foreigner must have also been a secret companion, who appeared and reappeared, who accompanied him without being asked to." Calasso's Kafkaesque readings, which tend to wind in labyrinthine fashion through the novels and stories, demonstrate not only the stylistic power of the fiction but also the reasons that Kafka's ghost haunts the pages of contemporary writers such as Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee, and Milan Kundera. Recommended for most libraries, especially those where his previous books have been popular.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.