Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...serious, probing artist with a consistent and distinctive vision.' His films are indeed suspiciously clone-like, but 'serious, probing'? By what standards? Well, says Yacowar, Manhattan can be compared with 'Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, another classic analysis of the decay of western culture.' Oh, and 'like Kafka, Allen makes Jews of us all.' We might wonder just what manner of man this is whose films can unite Kafka and Renoir. Yacowar has his answers...
...style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist...
...first book but in its format. In adopting the medium of fantasy, an author hopes to convince the reader not with the poignant accuracy of his images and characterizations, as in realistic fiction, but with the subtle, subliminal--but equally poignant--truth underlying the fabrication of plot and character. Kafka, Borges, Lem and Marquez succeed on this secondary level by treading a thin line between fantasy and realism--in The Castle, for example. Kafka's careful use of language preserves this ambiguity: the reader is never quite sure of what to accept as plausible, and what to reject as implausible...
Jerzy Kosinski's heroes have become dependable literary fixtures, as recognizable as Kafka's K. or Beckett's tramps. Rootless, quixotic, warped by an anti-childhood in Holocaust Europe, they traverse the American landscape like knights-errant on a futile search for purpose...
...relatively unknown: two long stories first published in American Review. In On the Air, a talent agent named Lippman attempts to book Albert Einstein as radio's first Jewish Answer Man, only to find that the road to Princeton is a gauntlet of murderous anti-Semites. Looking at Kafka began as a critical essay and gracefully unfurled into a fantasy in which Kafka did not die in 1924 but emigrated to New Jersey where he became Roth's Hebrew school teacher and troubled suitor of his maiden aunt...