Read more
Zusatztext “For such a writer [as Kafka]! Calasso is the ideal critic.” – The New Yorker “No one could bring more intelligence and cultural range to a fresh encounter with Kafka [than] the erudite and sophisticated Calasso. . . . His prose is a marvel! and K. makes for an exhilarating adventure.” –Frederick Crews! The New York Review of Books “Engaging. . . . As good an account of the strangeness of Kafka’s world and the reason for its bizarre coherence as anyone has offered.” – The New Republic “Translucent and revelatory. . . . It’s a measure of Calasso’s accomplishment that his readings feel familiar! as though his erudition were inside us. . . . His tone! while epic! is also welcoming.” – The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Roberto Calasso Klappentext From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony comes one of the most significant books in recent years on a writer of perennial interest-a virtuoso interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka. What are Kafka's fictions about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Countless answers have been offered, but the essential mystery remains intact. Setting out on his own exploration, Roberto Calasso enters the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of Kafka's work to discover why K. and Josef K.-the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial -are so radically different from any other character in the history of the novel, and to determine who, in the end, is K. The culmination of Calasso's lifelong fascination with Kafka's work, K. is also an unprecedented consideration of the mystery of Kafka himself. Leseprobe I. The Saturnine Sovereign At the beginning there's a wooden bridge covered with snow. Thick snow. K. lifts his eyes "toward what seemed to be emptiness," in die scheinbare Leere. Literally: "toward the seeming emptiness." He knows there's something out in that emptiness: the Castle. He's never seen it before. He might never set foot in it. Kafka sensed that by then only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named. He plunged the sharpest Ockham's razor into the substance of the novel. To name the bare minimum, and in its pure literality. And why so? Because the world was turning back into a primeval forest, too fraught with strange noises and apparitions. Everything had too much power. Thus it became necessary to limit oneself to what lay closest at hand, to circumscribe the zone of the nameable. Then all that power, otherwise diffuse, would be channeled there, and whatever was named--an inn, a file, an office, a room--would fill with unprecedented energy. Kafka speaks of a world that precedes every division, every naming. It's not a sacred or divine world, nor a world abandoned by the sacred or the divine. It's a world that has yet to recognize such categories, to distinguish them from everything else. Or that no longer knows how to recognize them or distinguish them from everything else. All is a single unity, and it is simply power. Both the greatest good and the greatest evil are saturated with it. Kafka's subject is that mass of power, not yet differentiated, broken down into its elements. It is the shapeless body of Vritra, which contains the waters, before Indra runs it through with a thunderbolt. The invisible has a mocking tendency to present itself as the visible, as if it might be distinguished from everything else, but only under certain circumstances, such as the clearing away of mist. Thus one is persuaded to treat it as the visible--and is immediately punished. But the illusion remains. The Trial and The Castle are stories about attempts to deal with a case: to extricate oneself from prosecution, to have one's nomination confirmed. The point arou...
