Classics Considered

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The cautionary cliche, while well known, still remains almost limitless in its potential for the mystery and thrillers genres.  Perhaps this is why watching My Name is Julia Ross (1945) immediately calls to mind its literary precursors from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Daphne du Maurier. The opening, in fact, takes a page out of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," only this time set in the 1940s.  Londoner Julia Ross is a beautiful young woman, recently unemployed and completely alone in the world.  Her only friend and would-be boyfriend, Dennis Bruce, has just announced his marriage to someone else.  Depressed, and at a loss for how to pay the bills, Julia responds to an ad seeking a secretary for a wealthy Mrs. Hughes.  Mrs. Hughes makes Julia a generous offer, on the condition that Julia come to live with her at her mansion in Cornwall.  When Julia wakes up the next day, she rea...

In this episode, I reminisce over the time I met Franz Kafka and my own "metamorphosis" as I discovered his Kafkaesque world.

I rarely read Kafka straight through.  Even in the middle of a story, I'll take a sudden hiatus and return to it later, not the worse for a break.  The world through his eyes is weird, menacing, and illogical, yet too close to reality to make it entirely escapism.  This collection of his complete short stories is no different; I've owned it for several years, and returned to it just now after an extended break. "Wedding Preparations in the Country" is less fanciful than his more famous work, The Metamorphosis , yet it is no less Kafkaesque.  Raban, a city dweller, is setting out on a rainy night to journey to the country, where his fiancee awaits him.  Along the way, he encounters his friend, Lement, as well as a host of strangers who leave their own influences on him and his already tenuous nerves.  Raban alternates between soaking in his surroundings and musing over the trip before him, finding little to comfort his anxieties and much to increase his sens...

Cover of a 1916 edition.   The book was first published in October 1915. of the publication of The Metamorphosis !  (I would link to the article I saw about it, but won’t because spoilers (sigh)). You know, it is on my list of top 10 favorites, but I’ve yet to read it on paper.  I first listened to the excellent LibriVox audiobook by David Barnes , then later I listened to a partly-abridged audiobook read by Cumberbatch.  I have it in my “Complete Short Stories” - I really should read it before the month’s up. It’s stunning to realize that, after 100 years, Kafka's insights are still very applicable.  Undoubtedly The Metamorphosis can mean different things to different people...  To me, at its most basic, it’s a concise analogy of the facade many people consider to be “love.”  In other words, when love is defined in materialistic, give-and-take terms, it means a “normal” family like the Samsas can turn into a dysfunctional one, when their “norm...

"That's what you're trying to eliminate, isn't it?   Everything that makes one human being different from another."  Perhaps it says the most to admit that, even so soon, I wouldn't mind watching this again. Hollywood and great authors rarely go together.  If that great author is Franz Kafka, one of my favorites, then the very concept is shaky and a good execution defies all odds.  Interestingly enough, Kafka  makes up its own concept and just goes for it.  Somehow even the pickiest of critics can find something to like about it. But can we talk about Jeremy Irons for a minute?  Portraying Kafka, he strikingly resembles Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes, which is only a good thing.  More to the point, Irons is the glue that holds the show together.  The supporting cast is fine, the script is pretty good, yet he is the one who brings credibility to the setting.  His timidity and humorless perspective bring out the best parts of Gregor Samsa,...

Last fall, at long last, I got a copy of Kafka's Complete Short Stories .  (That would be most everything except The Trial , The Castle , and Amerika .)  It's a book to be savored slowly, piece by piece, while imagining it to be twice its length (~ 450 p.).  I quickly found the best way to read it is jumping back and forth between the longer stories in the front and the micro fiction in the back. Franz Kafka - most people love his books or despise them.  That's pretty understandable.  He's not the most accessible of authors.  On my part, I fell for his writing after listening to The Metamorphosis ; since then, I keep coming back to his books.  Back to their chilling simplicity, back to their gloomy, frequently vulgar depiction of society.  Back to the endless plots that lead nowhere good! But of course, there's more to it than that.  There is a lot of truth in Kafka's world.  Absurdity, isolation, irony, and confusion.  The real wor...

For a limited time, you can listen online to Benedict Cumberbatch's recording of The Metamorphosis .  This (only slightly abridged) version is divided into four half-hour segments.  There are commercials before each part, so you will have to skip ahead a few minutes on each track.  I just finished the whole thing, and it's super good! 

"My intention was . . . to write a Dickens novel, enriched by the sharper lights which I took from our modern times, and by the pallid ones I would have found in my own interior."   - Diaries (1946), qtd. in "Amerika (novel)," Wikipedia. It is rarely my choice to read Franz Kafka all the way through.  Which is to say, I frequently express the intention of reading Kafka, and I read parts of his writings, but I tend to stumble upon reading any work of his in its entirety.  Amerika: or, The Missing Person (1927) was no exception - choosing it as my third read for the Turn of the Century Salon was a spontaneous decision, especially since I had previously determined not to read it in any case (I had very low expectations for a Kafka novel set in the U.S., rather than in Europe). For this and many other reasons, irony is a good adjective to describe Amerika and Kafka in general.  To name one example - could anything be more ironic than Kafka writing a no...

The Remains of the Day  Kazuo Ishiguro 4 out of 5 stars This award-winning novel is about an English butler, Mr. Stevens, who takes a road trip in the English countryside.  Though he attempts to keep a travelogue, he ends up reminiscing about his father, his friendship with housekeeper Miss Kenton, and his former employer's role in the Inter-War/WWII era. The book is pretty good, but I enjoyed the Anthony Hopkins film more.  His portrayal of Mr. Stevens is really moving, whereas book!Stevens is harder to like or understand.   The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Washington Irving 5 out of 5 stars I knew the story already (from the Disney animated film), but it was a delight to read the original!  Ichabod is a rather egotistical, materialistic guy in the book, so one hardly feels sorry for him.   A Passage to India E. M. Forster   2 out of 5 stars This book was really well-written, with some interesting depictions of the British Raj, but that's about it. ...

"And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment." - Kafka, 'An Imperial Message' This is part of a much longer paragraph about futility.  What I love about this quote is how, despite the overwhelming impossibilities, Kafka still fervently describes what could be--and what could be is still full of impossibility, and so on and so on.  In this way, he portrays the mixed feelings of a sort of defeat very effectively.   I'm going to read "In the Penal Colony" this week, and also impatiently waiting for a book of Kafka's complete short works from the library...

A good book, a bad book, a "love it or hate it" book.  It takes some willpower for me to review Franz Kafka 's The Trial as objectively as possible, but I must give it a mixed-feelings rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars . I believe I began reading this book last fall, before putting it aside for months and then finishing it recently.  It's the sort of book you can resume at any moment--because, apart from the beginning and the end, nothing happens .  I learned nothing and was intrigued.  It's evidently deep but reads like light summer reading.  It's a good book to read in public, because it will hold your interest despite distractions. In a nutshell:   The Trial is about a guy who, one fine morning, gets "arrested" for unknown reasons.  And by "arrest", it is not a "go directly to jail" arrest or even a house arrest--nothing so clear-cut and reassuring.  And "the Trial" is not about a trial in the typical sense, but about the...

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Edition:   LibriVox audiobook (public domain).  This was read by David Barnes, who also recorded Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde .  His reading style is easy to listen to (not too slow or too fast or anything), and I highly recommend it.  My overall rating:  5 out of 5 stars.  This would probably be on my list of must-read's. "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug." When I first considered reading The Metamorphosis , I had mixed feelings about it.  I had heard it was a classic, and I knew the basic plot.  But was it just going to be another one of those dark, melancholy, speculative books with little or no definite meaning?  It's a short book (the LibriVox recording is only about 2 1/2 hours long).  I decided to give it a try and listen to it in the car, on my way to and from school. The openin...