Word: kafka
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...KAFKA's short stories, an explorer arrives in a small, poor, and remote country, garrisoned by soldiers who wear uniforms that are much too hot but that serve as reminders of a faraway home. The ruler of this country has invented an ingenious method of punishment, a sort of harrow that cuts the text of a broken law into the lawbreaker's flesh. The script is so intricate that it takes a full twelve hours before the lawbreaker is dead...
...Americans have shared the difficulties of the explorer--watching, at first passively and then with mounting disapproval, first passively and then with mounting disapproval, as officers who appealed to their sense of justice and tradition inflicted prolonged punishment on people from a distant country. For the precise correctness of Kafka's officer there was the clinical detachment of various Rostows and Kissingers. For the mechanical sharpness of the harrow there were the exploding blades of the latest anti-personnel bombs. And though the Vietnamese refused to play the part of Kafka's passive lawbreaker, they, too--even...
...Chesterton found shelter in sense. His immense output (some 150 books and innumerable articles and poems) evidences a long wrangle with madness -the lunacy of the new century and the wildness of the mind. As Jorge Luis Borges observes, "Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish; something secret, and blind, and central...
...become a Catholic apologist, Thursday was written long before his conversion, and it does not yield to simple theological analysis. Sunday may be God; he may just as easily be Satan or the State. The council is a satiric conceit; it is also a social prophecy that antedates Kafka's The Trial by 15 years and the CIA by two generations. Syme's story rings with the sonorities of the Book of Job. It is also a splendid detective yarn...
Died. Theodore Schocken, 60, president of Schocken Books, Inc.; after a long illness; in White Plains, N.Y. A Jew, Schocken took over his father's Berlin publishing house in 1934 at the age of 19, issued a collection of Franz Kafka, including the corrosively antitotalitarian novel The Trial. Publication was soon halted by the Gestapo. Driven into exile in 1938, Schocken fought with the U.S. Army against the Nazis, later established his own publishing house in New York, bringing out translations of Kafka's once verboten works...