Word: kafka
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...worse to destroy a book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated -- their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later...
...alarm at the strange new force in one's life -- might have evoked adolescence for almost any reader. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a sequel that takes White into young manhood, is at once clumsier and much more ambitious. At times as pretentious as the title, derived from Kafka, it trots out a succession of irritatingly self-indulgent characters and a clutch of cliches about the 1950s, from the bohemian belle to the poet turned adman. Yet White can always save a wearying passage with some apercu about himself or some chillingly uninflected glimpse of cruelty. And if his protracted...
...about microwave cooking. In fact, that odorless, near instant preparation may take all the romance out of the kitchen entirely, obviating as it does the appreciation of a dish that cooks long and slowly, filling the house with its perfume as the ingredients develop. Nevertheless, Microwave Gourmet, by Barbara Kafka (Morrow; 575 pages; $19.95), should help those who have bought these electronic miracles and now wonder why. A restaurant consultant and food columnist, Kafka stresses cooking in a microwave, not heating. She emphasizes dishes made from scratch, many of them traditional in origin if not in execution. However, one might...
...Sunlight Dialogues its depth. Whereas law and order are fundamentally unjust, but able to survive, protest and chaos are incapable of enduring. Although The Sunlight Dialogues is set in the 1960s and uses the lingo of that decade, Gardner's book is far closer to the nightmare pessimism of Kafka's The Trial or Canetti's Auto-Da-Fe than to the hippie philosophizing of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...
...title evokes in equal measure the mundane pests who scurry through the apartment and the character in Kafka's Metamorphosis who arises one morning to find himself no longer a salesman but a bug. For this couple, each dawn is a reawakening to humiliation, each day a struggle to believe they can make an art as universal as Kafka's. They speak of their homeland with attempted distaste: "In Eastern Europe, nobody has a sincere smile except drunks and informers." They echo Poland's subjugation: they yearn to be Russian refugees, who they believe are more in fashion, and wish...