Word: kafka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...begins a crucial section of leading Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' latest novel, The Hydra Head. Billed as the first Third World spy thriller," The Hydra Head is about the loss of identity of Felix Maldonado, a minor bureaucrat in the Mexican government. In a Kafka-esque world in which he has no autonomy, Maldonado becomes an unwilling assassin in an international spy network competing over Mexico's newly discovered oil supply...
...wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day." I wonder if Camus read Kafka, who expressed a strikingly similar existential thought when he wrote: "Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session...
...trouble with Good as Gold is that Heller is never content to stay with Washington as Kafka Komix. He insists on ventriloquizing bleak pronouncements on the state of the union: "Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there." Or, "No society worth its salt would watch itself perishing without some serious attempt to avert its own destruction. Therefore, Gold concluded, we are not a society. Or we are not worth our salt. Or both...
...They don't try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake...
David Levine is the best-known political and literary caricaturist since Max Beerbohm. His cartoon of Lyndon Johnson's gall bladder scar in the shape of Viet Nam is a classic, and it is impossible to see a picture of Kafka, Mailer or Proust without remembering the artist's caustic lines. But there is another, gentler Levine: a water-colorist of enormous delicacy and control. The Arts of David Levine (Knopf; 205 pages; $25) celebrates both with generous samples of serious portraiture, beach scenes and parodic sketches that recall the nervous poignance of Daumier and fully justify John...