Word: kafka
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None of this is dazzlingly new; Kafka clearly is a grandfather of the movement, and Sartre and Camus are at least unacknowledged uncles. New Realism's most important idea is to show life scrubbed clean of theatricality, and in the novel's present period of torpor, the Paris insurrection cannot be ignored. Among the latest New Realism imports...
...village tragedy unfolded without the benefit of set pieces, ensembles or arias. Heavily percussioned, the orchestra sometimes sank to a rich, nervous whisper flickering through the strings, sometimes burst forth in anguished, brassy cries. Throughout, Janacek's use of exotic folk idiom wrapped the opera in an eerie, Kafka-like haze that did much to add depth and mysterious dimension to the melodramatic plot...
...suspects that his crime is "opacity"-that stubborn, unknowing refusal to bare his soul which has always enraged a man's neighbors and masters. If the literary shades of other prisoners seem to be sharing the cell in the old prison-fortress -for instance, Joseph K. of Franz Kafka's The Trial-they are quickly evicted with the first entry of the jailer. He is a redhaired, comic-opera functionary who promptly asks the prisoner for a waltz. As they whirl off down the corridor, it becomes plain what Author Nabokov is up to; he is writing...
Somehow, despite the dazzling dream dance of ironies, despite the poignant musings of the prisoner, the book is disappointing. Compared with the author's superior novels, it is only a kind of detour de force. It may be that, unlike Kafka, Nabokov sacrificed horror to hallucination -or that the young Nabokov did not really know what he was trying to say. Whether Cincinnatus was condemned by wicked masters, or whether he was self-condemned by his own conscience, the ending is both enigmatic and unsatisfactory; for, Nabokov appears to be saying, Cincinnatus can banish the carnival of evil around...
...secret: he is really a good man with a perfectly normal voice, forced by poverty into becoming a "ridiculous vagabond, living a lie." Inevitably, the charlatans' show ends in disaster, but the magician gets his revenge: he plays dead and, in a sequence eerie as a Kafka nightmare, torments a doctor who wants to dissect him. And at film's end, after numbing humiliations, the troupe is invited to perform for Sweden's king...