Word: brod
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more Kafkaesque than the original. His dying wish was totalitarian. Before he was finally killed by tuberculosis in 1924, he entreated his friend Max Brod to burn his books-to destroy the unpublished masterpieces (The Castle, The Trial, Amerika) that posthumously raised his estate from weird minor talent working in the ruins of Austria-Hungary to premonitory genius of the century's blackest impulses. Brod of course refused; it remained for both the Nazis and the Soviets to suppress Kafka's works-a neat case of reality confirming the artist's point...
Sometimes, it is Germanically heavy with melodrama. "Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward," he writes Max Brod in 1922, "but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child's lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits...
Probably the most successful story of the lot is "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," an account of a visit by Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Kafka's posthumous literary agent, and Brod's brother Otto to an air show in Italy. Most of Kafka's work was not published until after he died; he spent a good deal of his life as a lawyer specializing in insurance. Davenport is able to penetrate this shy, reflective character quite sensitively. As Kafka is traveling in a boat to Italy he thinks of Odysseus and then of his more successful relatives...
Later, Kafka compares the Italians flocking to the 1909 air show to tartar tribes invading an English garden party. What is most interesting about the story is that it was taken in part from original accounts by Kafka and Brod. One wonders whether it was Kafka, Brod, or Davenport who wrote this sentence...
...didn't take long for the protests to start. First, Derrick A. Bell, the Law School's only black professor, wrote privately last weekend to the forum's president, Howard Brod Brownstein, saying that the debate should be stopped...