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“... Can we manage this logical feat? And where are we? We are in a room at the Herrenhof Inn, in Kafka’s novel The Castle. The time is around 5 a.m.; K, the land surveyor hired by the castle authorities, but not as yet entrusted with any land-surveying, has an appointment with an official. His great goal, we have learned by now, is not necessarily to get ...”

“... several parts have cast such blinding light upon each other that you have ceased to understand how Franz Kafka (whose name, wisely, doesn’t appear in the book) could allow himself to be born and bred outside Vienna: quite seriously, if we accept all of Professor Schorske’s historical causations and correlations, the burden of explaining the ...”

“... I don’t know. Nothing whatsoever seemed to be approaching from any direction. I wait like an ox, Franz Kafka wrote and Mother underlined in one of her college books. The sentence was copied down like an axiom into one of the dozen or so Big Chief tablets I bought that summer, then let stay blank after a few scribbled pages. It is during this summer ...”

“... of Roth’s novels, and the tone of this passage will strike readers of Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka as familiar, perhaps even jadedly so. Yet the intensity of the commitment to Keatsian negative capability is remarkable in a writer so insistently loyal to the American novel’s covenant with quotidian, lived life. It is no small part of ...”

“... of unavoidable, universal guilt, as if this were the gospel according to Ivan Karamazov or Franz Kafka. Jesus was allowed to escape the massacre, he thinks, ‘so that I might learn of the crime which saved my life’. He means Joseph’s silence, which, although criminal, as Joseph himself comes to see it to have been, didn’t save ...”

“... literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard Schlink’. McCann is the high priest of high praise, always handy with a blessing. But his easy way with superlatives means that when he wants to pay a special tribute – to suggest that a writer is even better than Nathan ...”

“... they make new rather than merely making known. Roy Heath’s world is no more exotic than that of Franz Kafka, but it is no less exotic, either. After some acquaintance with Heath’s characters, the reader finds them not in the least strange, but so familiar as to be frightening, so that everything we know to be true of them – their sudden plunges ...”

“... this thing, or set out in quest of it, we will remain as isolated as that prince among paranoids, Franz Kafka, when he brought his creature, K., to his conclusion, when he identified the futile and meaningless instant of death. ‘But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and ...”

“... change in Moscow? – they will be ready with their busts of Tomas Masaryk, their editions of Franz Kafka and their memorials to Jan Palach. They know from their own experience in 1968, and from the Polish experience in 1980-81, how suddenly a society that seems atomised, apathetic and broken can be transformed into an articulate, united civil ...”

“... lover that places Marx in the company of ‘Keats, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence’. Marxist thought and the Modernist tradition converge for Berman, as both try to grasp and confront the modern experience: Marx’s ‘new-fangled men ... as much the invention of modern time as machinery itself’; Rimbaud’s ...”

“... baggage searched for hours. Back and forth across the map of modern literature he goes (Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov, Grass, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Bellow, Malamud...), and back with equal self-assurance to the monuments of the European tradition (Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes...). Although the range both of his current sympathies and of his remembered ...”

“... a book crammed with German-speaking sages and sexologists should have nothing at all to say about Franz Kafka, whose interventions in his own literal and literary corpus were systematic to the point of mania. And there is also a certain fluidity about Armstrong’s terms of analysis: the fact that a point of view is developed with great conviction in one ...”

“... cheap Parker pens.’Children are mostly wrong, but also superior to us. Reading Reiner Stach’s Kafka: The Early Years, I found myself thinking often of Sendak. Maybe this is only because I read too many children’s books too many times, and such rereading makes Kabbalah from anything. Or maybe, more tendentiously, because Sendak and ...”

“... the ravages of the Black Death of 1348. (‘I would like to tell you, ladies and gentlemen,’ Franz Kafka told a German-speaking audience in Prague before a recital of visiting Yiddish poets, ‘how much more of the jargon you will understand than you think.’) This kinship was the reason why the Slavs, and the Hungarians too, denounced their Jews ...”

“... and then it came to me. I jotted down the book proposal on a napkin. Provisional title: My Friend Franz: Chronicle of a Life Not a Little Kafkaesque. Chapter 1: Age 13. Read ‘The Metamorphosis’ – own body undergoing changes never anticipated. Develop a passionate interest in entomology. Crippling phobia about apples. Chapter 2: At university I read ...”