Word: samsa
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...does Kafka remain, 100 years after his birth, one of the authentic voices of the age? The answer lies in this centenary volume, Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. His tales, some no more than a paragraph long, have forced their way into the modern consciousness. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa turns into an insect; in A Hunger Artist, a professional faster starves himself to death "because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." In In the Penal...
...Kafka's fiction the only history is case history: his own. Whether he is called Samsa, Raban or Joseph K., every protagonist is Franz. The oppressive boss, commandant or schoolmaster are all refractions of Hermann Kafka, the father Franz feared: "You acquired in my eyes that enigmatic quality common to all tyrants, whose authority rests not on what they think but on who they are." The accident files that Kafka used by day become A Report to an Academy: "You have done me the honor of inviting me to give an account of the life I formerly...
...spoken. There Freud. So go war and peace, pride and prejudice, decline and fall, perpetually in motions as sweeping as Milton's or as slight as Emily Dickinson considering the grass. Every evening Gatsby looks at Daisy's green light, which is green forever. Every morning Gregor Samsa discovers that he has been transformed into a giant insect...
...Hayman's attitude towards Kafka, it is, not surprisingly, less reverential that Max Brod's; Brod's biography seemed to be written chiefly as an antidote to the view that anyone who created Gregor Samsa must have been a dark and morbid character, though Brod's work is honest and engaging, we almost lose sight of all the self-torture in the radiance of the saint-like glow. Hayman's biography is more balanced, but also admiring (as anyone must be) of Kafka's incredible lack of cynicism, even as he was dying...
...witness his writhing. Grab another beer and shake your heads. Poor Kafka. Why he clung so desperately to his father, why he endlessly romaticized him and even incorporated a piece of his shopkeeper, artist-as-vermin mentality--these are questions that Hayman knows are unanswerable. How 'bout that Gresor Samsa--transformed into a dung beetle so he kills himself with sorrow watching his family carry on the breadwinning without him. And with all that space on the ceiling where you crawl till your heart's content...