Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FRIEND OF KAFKA AND OTHER STORIES by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 31 1 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
They are moving two blocks down Central Park West, but Jaffe proves incapable of coping with that humdrum task. In a running routine that is a very low mutation of Kafka, Jaffe is consistently unable to persuade the anonymous moving man to move his furnishings. This is supposed to be a metaphor for Jaffe's general ineffectuality; it comes across as merely improbable...
Nearly 5,000,000 readers nevertheless found it one of the most original comic novels of their time. They found it so funny, in fact, that surely half of them ignored Heller's own warnings: that Catch-22 is no more about the Army Air Corps than Kafka's The Trial was about Prague; that "the cold war is what I was truly talking about, not the World War"; and that the second biggest character in the novel is death...
...explain a Groucho Marx joke to someone who has never heard of Groucho Marx. In desperation Barthelme critics sometimes resort to the comparison gambit, frantically coupling their man with a host of others in the course of one review. The catalogue ranges from Dickens, Swift and Joyce to Kafka, Nabokov and Henry Miller...
...KAFKA SUPPOSED that the artist was like a "soaring dog," like the small animals floating invisible through the world above our heads: "They have no relation whatever to the general life of the community, they hover in the air, and that is all, and life goes on its usual way; someone now and then refers to art and artists, but there it ends." Poets would like to emulate the Investigations of Kafka's dogs, or even become fish, as Virgil Thompson has suggested; for they have always found the chore of living among the forms of possibility a tedious...