Word: kafka
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...proper study of mankind may be man, but writers from Aesop to Kafka to Orwell have found animals just as instructive. The latest to scan human nature in the visage of the beast is French Author Pierre Gascar whose Beasts and Men was published as two separate books in France, one of which (Les Betes) unprecedentedly won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix des Critiques awards in 1953. Very much in the Kafka tradition, Author Gascar has put together in these short stories as mordant and bone-chilling a set of circumstances as modern literature has had to offer since...
Waiting for Godot, by 50-year-old Irish-born Samuel Beckett, who was once a sort of secretary to James Joyce, is one more of those writings that pose philosophic question marks with the emphasis of exclamation points. Like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Kafka's The Castle and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, Waiting for Godot makes who's who-and sometimes what's what-a kind of guessing game...
...ordinary people when they let themselves go and get entangled in extraordinary situations. Isabel Eastwood, the "perfect woman" of this novel, is an ordinary woman who dreamed in her younger days of dedicating her life to something rare and wonderful. But just when she was getting the hang of Kafka and the tang of Joyce, she married Harold, a chartered accountant who regarded life as a sort of income-tax return and his Creator as an Inspector of Internal Revenue. The Inspector, as Harold sees Him, is not a Kafka type. He expects a human being's accounts...
...indeed, there is little evidence that he seriously asks for God's help, or tries with any genuine religious understanding to commend his spirit into God's hands. He just goes it alone like a self-sufficient 19th century liberal, or at best like a sort of Kafka in scarlet-both of which are improbable states of soul in a dedicated clergyman of any faith...
...convicts looking for a place to hide find the perfect setup in the middle-class home of a department store executive. In order to arouse no suspicions among the neighbors and the police, the criminals force the executive and his family to live as though nothing had happened. The Kafka-like mixture of horror and routine that results gives the picture most of its emotional impact...