Word: kafka
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Says Biographer Brod: "Of all believers [Kafka] was the freest from illusions, and among all those who see the world as it is, without illusions, he was the most unshakable believer...
Religious Humorist. The mood in which Kafka energizes his perception of the incompatibility of God and man is unequivocal, masculine and as glitteringly clear as winter air. He is the least sentimental or feminine of modern writers. But truth and derangement are galley-mates, since the horror that tugs at the same oar is the perception that man and his fate by human standards are monstrous. Kafka retains his sanity by his realization that man's fate is also divine comedy. This is the hinge of his unearthly irony...
...Kafka has been called a gloomy writer, a follower of bleak Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. He was, in fact, one of the rarest types in literature-a religious humorist...
...Brod recalls that when Kafka read to friends the opening chapters of The Trial (the story of a man crucified by inches), they laughed till the tears ran down their cheeks, and Kafka himself laughed so hard he could not go on reading. It is, says Novelist Thomas Mann solemnly, "very deep-rooted and involved" humor. Kafka's cosmic comedy of man's foredoomed failure in his quest for God is brought down to earth and up to the minute by the use (in The Trial and The Castle) of all the adventitious paraphernalia of 20th Century living...
...Kafka has also been called a theological writer, a philosophical writer, a Zionist, a Freudian, a bitter social critic, a Kafkaist. Plain readers may brush aside the tags. For them two facts are important: 1) to express the manifold, intangible anguish of life, Kafka told his greatest stories in the condition of dreams (he understood that dreams, despite their infinite fluidity of merging forms, have great narrative economy); 2) as a symbolist (Kafka's long books are called novels chiefly by reason of their length), he found for his two greatest stories, The Trial and The Castle...