Word: kafka
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With his chilling vision of man as a helpless pawn caught within a brutalizing bureaucracy, Franz Kafka would have been intrigued by the sad happenings in his native Prague last week. He would probably have seen both captor and captives as almost equally powerless. The captor, in this instance, was Party Leader Gustav Husák, who has repeatedly vowed since taking power in 1969 that supporters of ousted Reformer Alexander Dubček would not be put on trial for their roles in Prague's short-lived "springtime of freedom," which was crushed by the Soviet-led invasion...
...reader confidently pronounces himself in Kafka country and prepares to stalk long antiseptic corridors in search of that unnamed chief clerk known to Kafka as God. But Sloan's complexity makes Kafka seem elementary stuff. Mixing diaries, psychiatrists' reports, and computer printouts, Sloan systematically undermines the original account of Comrade V. by offering alternative versions...
...author invites the thoroughly turned-around reader to consider these possibilities, Sloan's literary master seems less Kafka than Jorge Luis Borges. He writes dazzling mini-essays on schizophrenia, stoicism, and the role of the artist in relation to society as if his own definition of an artist's job were, in William Gass's memorable phrase, "to canonize confusion...
...really significant revolt against reason took place 40 to 100 years ago. Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kafka's The Trial, Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents-by comparison with these masterpieces, even the best among today's Madness Revolution artists seem dilettantes. But the new madness has taken the visions in hell of the masters and vulgarized them as chic. Perhaps the change was inevitable. Plato's charioteer had become the fat cat in the back of the limousine. Reason too often has dried up into "common...
While the mood of Old Prague comes through on some of the pages, much of the book bears out Kafka's own statement form the Conversations that "Photography concentrates one's eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life...One can't catch that even with the sharpest lens...