From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Calasso's study is a milestone not just in the ever burgeoning literature about Kafka, but in literature itself. This remarkably elegant essay gains its intellectual authority from Calasso's tone: he's amazingly well read, without being a factotum of any particular discipline. Elias Canetti remarked that Kafka was, as a writer "so utterly himself" that the critic "must, even at the risk of seeming slavish, adhere as closely as possible to his [Kafka's] own statements." Calasso follows this advice. Among the insights into
The Castle that make the first four chapters a must for interested readers of that work is the way in which Calasso sees K. as a continuation of Josef K, the hero of Kafka's earlier
The Trial. "
The Castle," Calasso claims, "is Josef K's
bardo" ("the intermediate state" in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead). Calasso is so intimate with the texts, including the diaries, short stories and
The Trial, that his voice sometimes emerges uncannily from the texts themselves, as though he were one of those mysterious exegetes that Kafka loved to put in his stories. Particularly astute is Calasso's observation that the image of the assimilated Jew runs through the novels like a great latent anxiety dream, leading outward, to Kafka's prophetic sense of the insecurity of the Jews in Central Europe, and inward, to the household of Kafka's father. Kafka has had marvelous interpreters in the past, including Walter Benjamin, Canetti and Maurice Blanchot. Without exaggeration, Calasso (
Literature and the Gods) belongs in this elevated company.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Calasso, the inspired scholar and author of such unusual works as
Literature and the Gods (2001), here performs his signature interpretative magic in a deep immersion in the writings of Franz Kafka. Taking his title from the protagonists Joseph K. in
The Trial and K. in
The Castle, the two novels that most profoundly convey Kafka's acute vision of humanity in general and modern society in particular, Calasso meshes at a seemingly cellular level with Kafka's language, images, and stories as he extracts and identifies the motifs and perspectives that have made Kafka such a towering presence in our collective imagination. Calasso discusses with great subtlety how Kafka's tales revolve around an individual being either chosen or condemned, Kafka's expertise in "the feeling of being foreign or extraneous," and his fascination with "dark powers." Calasso then enriches his discerning and moving exegesis with excerpts from Kafka's remarkably expressive notebooks and letters. By harmonizing so empathically with his subject, Calasso rekindles appreciation for the unique and indelible power of Kafka's work as well as its rueful beauty.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
