Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...science, 1883 was the natal year of a pair of Czech novelists whose lookouts on the problem of monolithic authority and what to do about it are presently very much in point. In a country which has earned its reputation as the common stamping ground of optimistic power, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek came to know the texture and stink of vast administratives schemes so vicious, irrational, and irremediably tacky that they generate comedy and tragedy, like industrial waste, in awe-some volume, beyond any man's capacity to absorb without the saving intercession...
...Builders by Boris Vian, which opened off-Broadway last week as the French playwright's first New York production, nearly a decade after his death at 39. Vian, who was also a novelist, poet, composer, translator, jazz trumpeter and engineer, obviously owed much to the work of Franz Kafka. Ordinary, everyday characters are beset and beleaguered by fantastic circumstances beyond their control-neither exactly allegorical nor neatly symbolic -which fill them with dread. As the play progresses, The Sound drives the increasingly unsettled father into even smaller and poorer apartments. The members of the menage disappear...
There is more P. G. Wodehouse in The Do-Gooders than the deadly amoral wit of Bruce Jay Friedman or Joseph Heller. The true black humorists spring from Franz Kafka, Céline, James Joyce and Nathanael West. Imitations like this owe their origins to the pop-art Campbell soup cans, underground "art" movies, and the overpowering amplification systems that give rock music its driving force...
...other side of the platform. A classic Hitchcock opening for a film that is missing only one vital ingredient: Alfred Hitchcock. In the maestro's place, however, is his greatest disciple, Director Francois Truffaut, who considers Hitchcock "an artist of anxiety" to be placed alongside Kafka...
What Vian was driving at is not entirely clear. Like Harold Pinter, and even more like the novelist Franz Kafka, he creates a world in which more questions are raised than answers given; in which words often conceal rather than reveal meaning; in which, at the end, mystery is not clarified but rather intensified...