Beguiling, quirky stories perfectly in keeping with the rest of Kafka’s work; often troubling but sometimes delightful.
A freshly translated collection of posthumously published work by the great master of existential angst and insectoidal transformation.
Kafka did not live long, but he produced an impressive body of work, most of it written in the dark, quiet hours after midnight. Perhaps that accounts for its preternatural gloom, for no one ever cracks a smile in a Kafka story. As translator Hofmann puts it, just right, Kafka “devised for himself a life that was largely disagreeable, inflexible and inescapable, and tried to make it productive.” He succeeded on all counts. Here, a number of odd themes emerge that perhaps connect to Kafka’s penumbral ways: at times, for instance, the narrator holds some sort of night job that puts him in oblique contact with the bureaucrats and bosses who rule the day, as in “New Lamps,” in which an official at company headquarters promises a safety-minded miner better oil lamps by which to work and instructs him to tell his fellow workers, “We won’t rest until we’ve converted your mineshaft into a drawing room.” Other stories illustrate Kafka’s interest in allegories and fables, especially with an Asian coloring, as with “Building the Great Wall of China,” a sketch that speaks of the power of empire to overwhelm the individual, even though the people “are where it ultimately draws its support.” As with the title story, many of Kafka’s stories involve animals. There, the dogs in question revel in a kind of “dogdom” or “dogness” hard won by evolving from their ancestors: “Our generation may be lost,” the narrator tells us, “but it is more innocent than its predecessors.” Just so, a character in another story has “taken a great interest in Elberfeld horses,” that is, horses trained to think like humans—and it’s a short step from there to Gregor Samsa.
Beguiling, quirky stories perfectly in keeping with the rest of Kafka’s work; often troubling but sometimes delightful.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2689-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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