Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world of these volumes is both sane and sinister in the tradition of Kafka. Rules Relating offers this scenario...
...structure of the show is that of the audition, the Spanish Inquisition of the theater. Unseen, speaking with the muffled voice of Kafka's God, the casting director asks each of the potential finalists for an accounting of his life and his love for dance and the theater. These accounts are just as mawkish, banal, self-absorbed and dream-bent as would be those of any of the playgoers. They are redeemed by humor and honesty...
This tradition is best represented by the work of two authors writing at Prague at the end of World War I: Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Schweik). The tradition could be called the literature of the absurd: with Kafka it is expressed through the feeling of alienation, with Hasek through a satiric sense of humor. Joseph Skvorecky continues the latter tradition with his novel The Tank Brigade, where the contemporary Schweik is confronted with the stupidity and absurdity of the Czech army at the height of the Stalinist era, instead of the Austrian Army of Franz Joseph...
Ludvik Vaculik's novel The Guinea Pigs (NY: Third Press) is a most brilliant venture in the Kafka-esque vein. Like Joseph K. in The Trail, Vaculik's hero is a bank employee. He lives a petty monotonous life with his wife Eva, "two tolerable little boys" and a couple of newly acquired guinea pigs that soon become the center of the family life. Our clerk works in a weird bank; enigmatic employees of the bank walkd out everyday with some of the bank notes in their pockets. Sometimes the money is confiscated by the guards at the exit...
...long as not common people but people like Rusk ran their government, people who just trusted in it because they loved their country and weren't very interested in politics were likely to find themselves traveling in strange, hostile, bewildering countries, like Kafka's explorer. As the orphans poured in, and word began to spread that even the Saigon government's own troops might turn against withdrawing American troops, 'populist' papers like The Chicago Tribune began to thunder about incomprehensible Vietnamese ingratitude...