Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This is not a story by Franz Kafka or by one of his contemporary imitators. It is a recent dream remembered in precise detail by a successful New Yorker (one wife, three children, fair income, no analyst) who works with every outward appearance of contentment in one of Manhattan's new, midtown office buildings. Whatever Freudian or other analysis might make of it, the dream could serve as a perfect allegory for an era that is almost universally regarded as the Age of Anxiety. It speaks of big city towers in which life is lived in compartments and cubicles...
Here Comes Pete Now, by Thomas Anderson. The New York waterfront serves as background to an oblique parable of man's groping, with Beckett and Kafka overtones...
Although Dodecaphonist Dallapiccola believes that his spiritual brother is James Joyce (he has read Ulysses eight times), Variations sounds more like a page out of Kafka. It opens with a funereal, ghostlike theme in the strings, erupts in a chilling shower of brasses, sinks to a series of restless, enervated whispers. Percussive and rhythmically complex throughout, it is scored sparely, skillfully using small instrumental combinations in strange, exhilarating blends of sound. What sets it apart from much of the desiccated twelve-tone music of the Viennese school is its sense of passion: Dallapiccola, however his music may suffer, always seems...
...best of all fictional accounts of the Korean war. Anderson's new novel is set down as firmly as its title, but what it pins to paper is an experience that shades from simple fact into fantasy and compulsion, in much the hallucinatory manner of Franz Kafka...
Night is one way of defining day. Steeped in opposites, paradoxes and negations, modern religious fiction tends to define godliness in the same way. In the novels of Kafka, Mauriac and Graham Greene, the hero is conscious not of the presence but the absence of God, not of the nearness but the distance of divine grace, not of the order but the absurdity of God's universe. Obsessively self-abased, the religious hero is a man of little faith, and his heroism is to know...