Word: kafka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...neurasthenic romanticism of Mahler was transmuted in these works to a testament and a valedictory. The plasticity of musical idioms was clearly responding to a mellower comprehension of what had happened to man as a result of the conflagration. Composers were succeeding in speaking in the distorted world of Kafka and Wilfred Owen. Berg's works, directly descended from Mahler's Ninth Symphoney, perhaps the supreme symphonic masterpiece of the century, formed a melancholy Agnus Dei. A most moving expression of this mood of lachrymose serenity is found in "The Drinking Song of Earth's Sorrow" set by Mahler...
...different order. At two hours, it is far too long, no matter how good the stories. Last week a sensitive-and not always flattering-portrait of a New York City policeman was buried deep in the program. Sander Vanocur's evocative interview with Clay Shaw, portraying Shaw as Kafka's loseph K. in the Mardi Gras world of New Orleans, was the night's ninth story. First Tuesday's 50-minute investigation of the Army's chemical-biological warfare program, by far the best single story produced by either video magazine, came on after some...
...febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story of the apocalypse as some sort of cautionary tall tale...
...Kafka's heroes are like the sculptures of Giacometti: all elements of mask and attitude are burned away until only an irreducible essence remains. As the surveyor, Schell accurately embodies the man known only as "K." His agony and bewilderment are true, to the final exhausted syllable. The villagers are a finely balanced mixture of arrogance and dread. Kafka's tales all take place in limbo; the movie fills its snowbound setting with an unworldly black-comic air appropriate to the author, whom Thomas Mann called "a religious humorist." Pompous officials deliver pronunciamentos even when there...
...film version allows no such richness of interpretation. As if Kafka had written some Now film to capitalize on student unrest, the movie promotes itself as the story of "one man against the Establishment." That is absurd-but not the absurdity that Kafka was writing about...