Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Camus pushes these questions up the fashionable modern Parnassus-inhabited by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Gide, and all manner of existentialists. In the end, a little existentialist moss clings to his rolling stone, and Camus achieves his answer: "Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged . . . There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." Sisyphus has achieved "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair)." Rope or Cravat? While it is no news, of course, that French intellectuals of the Left have left the church, a lot of people will wish that they would stop arguing so noisily...
...measured against his contemporaries in the German language-Gerhart Hauptmann, Rilke, Kafka, Stefan Zweig et al.-Mann was still a giant. And against charges that he was "Olympian," "pompous," "ponderous," he could well defend himself: "My endeavor," he wrote, "is to make the heavy light; my ideal is clarity; and if I write long sentences-a tendency inherent in the German tongue-I make it my business, not without success, to maintain the utmost transparency and spoken rhythm." In German he was an exquisite stylist, and he brought to that language a new sensitivity in the art of storytelling...
...minimum of tunes and some very strange harmonic goings-on indeed. And yet it is a strong work from overture to the final hymn to freedom, and is even gripping in three long narratives by the prisoners against a background of unnerving orchestral fantasy. Over all hangs an eerie, Kafka-like haze that results partly from the use of exotic folk idiom, partly from acoustical theories that led Janacek to dispense with accepted harmonic transitions. Because of its static quality, Aus Einem Totenhaus has had few performances in the opera house. On records it is the score that counts...
...Holy Devil, The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, Triumph Over Pain), he has now written a strange, heavily symbolic, sometimes embarrassingly earnest novel. The Night of Time is a kind of Kafkaesque parable. But Adam and the men of Hill 317 have a saving humanity and individuality that Kafka's sleepwalkers lack...
...character from a Kafka novel, no fugitive from Red brainwashing. He is an artisan in the San Francisco Bay region and, until 2½ years ago, he was perfectly normal. Then he was seriously injured in an auto accident. The broken bones mended well enough, but soon he made the frightening discovery that he could not recognize people by their faces...