Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Drawn Sword is a disturbing allegory: the desperate desire of Mr. Average for an existence in which love and comradeship replace tension and uncertainty. The book's elaborate use of symbolism, its bewildering time scheme in which past & present merge crazily, sharply recall the brooding of Novelist Franz Kafka. There is one important difference: Kafka's theme was man's search for God. Brooke's dazed hero would settle for something which he almost, but never quite, comes out and names: brotherhood on earth...
...Tristram Shandy's garrulous Uncle Toby-a "vast, benevolent and harmless Uncle Toby, leaning on his stick . . . and wheezing out his stories of Henry James as Toby might have spoken of Marlborough. His books seemed [to us] like medals achieved, perhaps, in the Crimea; and we read Auden, Kafka, Evelyn Waugh...
...could never have painted The Cry (a canvas bulging with Kafka-like horror which he did at 30), but neither could the young drunk have painted the Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed that Munch did four years before his death. That picture of a human being cornered by old age would stand as one of his finest, freshest works...
...this tumultuous moment in its proper largeness, Professor Hughes has called to his aid those seemingly incompatible philosopher-historians, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. For intuitive insight into the mood of our time he has consulted the novelists: Proust, Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Sartro, and Camus. This seems to be the century of feeling rather than reason, and the writers were better able to feel the tenor of their time than the professional philosophers have been able to intellectualize it. The novelists were intensely subjective, relativistic, and often, like Kafka, gave a sense of the little man being enmeshed in incomprehensible...