Word: kafka
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...They don't try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake...
Moravia said Dostoyevsky has had the most influence upon his writing. He noted too the influences of Kafka, Hemingway, and Bocaccio...
...cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have...
...enormous success of Lolita in 1958, which freed Nabokov from teaching, made most people aware for the first time that he had practically a lifetime of such writing behind him. Had the students only known it, their professor was not only explaining Dickens or Flaubert or Kafka. With his quirky insights, his cunning traceries and meticulous diagrams, he was also charting the mind of another great novelist: himself. -By Christopher Porterfield
...writer who discerns between the merely clever and the simply hilarious? A pundit who deploys verbs like "fumfering" and "obsessing," and adjectives like "guileness?" A knish of a man whose favorite characters are Tiffany and Eino Shmeederer and Sidney and Daphne Kuglemass? A clown who ridicules Plato and Kafka while laughin over the lascivious portions of Emma Bovary? Woody Allen, whose "one regret in life is that he is not someone else...