Word: kafka
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With hindsight, Updike's unswerving dedication to realistic fiction looks both daring and inspired. At the beginning of his career, the prevailing wisdom held that Joyce, Proust and Kafka had made the old-fashioned novel redundant, a tired illusion that had been exposed once and for all as a sham. Literature should no longer pretend to portray people doing things: it ought to be an artful arrangement of words on a page. Critic Richard Oilman, typically, called narrative "that element of fiction which coerces and degrades it into being a mere alternative to life." Updike's novels...
...know that one is famous and to feel that one doesn't deserve it at all." This problem was one that Walser (1878-1956) never had to face. Three of his novels were published during his lifetime, and his work won the admiration of such contemporaries as Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse. But the Swiss-born Walser received almost no public recognition or support. He spent the last 27 years of his life in mental institutions, and his writings, all in German, seemed permanently consigned to the limbo of the unread...
...most recent are powerful condensations of modern life by Heinrich Boll, who describes a professional laugher producing merriment on cue for everyone but himself, and Paula Fox, whose News from the World describes a woman and her contaminated seaside village withering for lack of love. Between these terminals, Chekhov, Kafka, Mishima, Hemingway, Borges and a score of other master miniaturists show that brevity can be not merely the soul of wit, but the whole of it, and that almost all writing can benefit with pruning, from the short story to the rave review...
...Trial, by Franz Kafka...
Ronald Hayman's biography is excruciating to read. Though the survival of Kafka's work, at lest, is consoling, all the high-school tragedy course rot about our uniquely human capacity to suffer makes it no easier to witness his writhing. Grab another beer and shake your heads. Poor Kafka. Why he clung so desperately to his father, why he endlessly romaticized him and even incorporated a piece of his shopkeeper, artist-as-vermin mentality--these are questions that Hayman knows are unanswerable. How 'bout that Gresor Samsa--transformed into a dung beetle so he kills himself with sorrow watching...