Word: kafka
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...essays on such subjects as doors, chairs and bridges. His beat is not politics, and at first his meanderings through the capital seem almost pointless. Yet he is a master at extricating the revealing from the commonplace, and he soon accumulates enough eccentric encounters to indicate that Franz Kafka would feel at home in Washington today...
Davenport brings a curious new genre to literature: short historical fiction. In dispensing with the burdens of longer historical novels, Tatlin! presents an exciting array of portraits including Franz Kafka, Herakleitos, an ancient Greek philosopher, Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian artist, Henry Breuil, a French anthropologist, and minor sketches of Picasso, Chagall, Lenin and Stalin...
Probably the most successful story of the lot is "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," an account of a visit by Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Kafka's posthumous literary agent, and Brod's brother Otto to an air show in Italy. Most of Kafka's work was not published until after he died; he spent a good deal of his life as a lawyer specializing in insurance. Davenport is able to penetrate this shy, reflective character quite sensitively. As Kafka is traveling in a boat to Italy he thinks of Odysseus and then of his more successful relatives...
...Later, Kafka compares the Italians flocking to the 1909 air show to tartar tribes invading an English garden party. What is most interesting about the story is that it was taken in part from original accounts by Kafka and Brod. One wonders whether it was Kafka, Brod, or Davenport who wrote this sentence...
...said that they must agree to remember the hole in the floor, through which they could now see a great red pizza being quartered with a knife that, as Kafka observed, was surely a gift of the Khan to Marco Polo, as each of them over the years would tend to doubt his sanity remembering...