Word: kafka
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...Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1968. I was there then to support my friends the writers, the students and statesmen of the Prague Spring. I heard them give thanks, at least, for their few months of freedom as night fell once more upon them; the night of Kafka, where nothing is remembered but nothing is forgiven...
Kleist's letters, collected in An Abyss Deep Enough, augment this sense of modernity: "Heaven is pleased to grant desires that comply with its purpose, why then must it be we who are excluded from its favor?" It is no wonder that Kafka came to regard Kleist's writings as "the works of a master"; they anticipate The Castle by a century...
...shards of this experience, Appelfeld, now a renowned Israeli novelist, has composed a tale of appalling symmetry. Among Appelfeld's many novels and stories of the Holocaust (Badenheim 1939, The Age of Wonders), Tzili best exemplifies Kafka's bitter aphorism, "The arrows fit exactly in the wounds they have made...
...what is it he does in that mysterious classroom when the thick wood door shuts behind him and the rows of too young faces turn and rise Like heliotropic plants, eager for a sign? "Today we consider Kafka." Is that in fact what "we" are considering today? Or are we considering the teacher considering Kafka, and if that is the case, what exactly is to be considered-the learned scholar stocked deep with information about "irony" and "metaphor," or the still deeper mind, which has confronted Kafka alone in a private dark, and which Kafka has confronted in turn...
...becoming caricatures. King is particularly apt in capturing a half-tipsy and harassed post-party mood during his early scenes. Licia Hurst has more trouble with the difficult role of Celia: she is the one character severely handicapped by her English accent and many of her monologues drag. Alexander Kafka, generally an appealing Peter, takes the character's confusion to an extreme: not only is Peter upset most of the time he's on stage, but one finds it difficult to imagine him ever calm...