K. - Hardcover

Roberto Calasso

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400041899 ISBN 13: 9781400041893

Publisher: Knopf, 2005

Synopsis

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka: an utterly original, fascinating interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka that is simultaneously an unprecedented exploration into the mystery of Kafka himself.

What are Kafka’s stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? Countless answers have been offered, but the question still arouses feelings of acute uncertainty. Many solutions have been proposed, but the essential mystery remains intact.  In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. To that end, with his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into a puzzling question: why are K. and Josef K.–the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial–so radically different from any other characters in the history of the novel? So, in the end, the most basic question along the way is: Who is K.?

The culmination of the author’s lifelong fascination with Kafka, K. is a book of significant literary importance, the fourth part in a work in progress of which the previous volumes are The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and Ka.

About this title

About the Author

Roberto Calasso is also the author of The Forty-Nine Steps and Literature and the Gods. He lives in Milan and is the publisher of Adelphi.

Reviews

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.)
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Kafka's fiancée once wrote to him that she had taken his handwriting to a graphologist, who detected "artistic interests." Kafka wrote back, disdainfully, "I don't have literary interests. I'm made of literature, I'm nothing else and can be nothing else." For such a writer, the erudite Italian novelist and publisher Calasso is the ideal critic. Under his patient gaze, the inner connections of Kafka's writing emerge; for instance, he sees the mysterious world of "The Castle," encountered by the land surveyor, K., as a sort of limbo into which Josef K., from Kafka's earlier novel "The Trial," has fallen. An elegant writer, Calasso is particularly attuned to the strong erotic undercurrents in Kafka's writing and is suitably wary of finding any overarching philosophy.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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 Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400041899
• ISBN 13: 9781400041893
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336