Word: franzes
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...Franz Biberkopf presses his hands to the sides of his head, as if he were about to pulverize a rancid cantaloupe, and screams. He staggers wildly about the apartment-house courtyard, its high walls allowing the merest tantalizing glimpse of sky. This is Germany, 1927. As the nation spun from the humiliation of Versailles to economic and social anarchy, and then into the toxic delirium of the Third Reich, so Franz spins. A laborer and part-time pimp who has just been released from prison after serving four years for beating a girlfriend to death, Franz has few resources...
...coroner ("Then she sank to the part of his body she thought was his heart but was in fact his sternum and the upper lobe of his left lung"). A physician like his spiritual contemporary Céline, Döblin saw Germany as a huge human slaughterhouse and Franz as "a big, good-natured sheep.' Mixing statistics of death and disease with the story of some petty, brutal people living in East Berlin, Döblin created a 600-page epic that was part newsreel, part nightmare-a documentary melodrama written in blood and neon. Through...
Anguish was not Franz Kafka's central obsession. It was his only one: the misery of illness, the descending sorrows of guilt, estrangement and despair. Torment stains every page of his fiction, and his autobiographical writings are so clotted with disorders that one collection states: "Frequent references to insomnia and headache have not been included in the index...
Given this nihilism, this self-loathing that seems the dark side of narcissism, why does Kafka remain, 100 years after his birth, one of the authentic voices of the age? The answer lies in this centenary volume, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. His tales, some no more than a paragraph long, have forced their way into the modern consciousness. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa turns into an insect; in A Hunger Artist, a professional faster starves himself to death "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made...
...Kafka's fiction the only history is case history: his own. Whether he is called Samsa, Raban or Joseph K., every protagonist is Franz. The oppressive boss, commandant or schoolmaster are all refractions of Hermann Kafka, the father Franz feared: "You acquired in my eyes that enigmatic quality common to all tyrants, whose authority rests not on what they think but on who they are." The accident files that Kafka used by day become A Report to an Academy: "You have done me the honor of inviting me to give an account of the life I formerly...