Spent the afternoon and evening reading this. While the title story is distinctly weird--the word I'd go for is "surreal," though that might not have been in the vocabulary yet when Kafka was writing--most of the stories here seem better described as "neurotic." The big takeaway for me is that fiction from 100-ish years ago is going to be *alien*, whatever the intent, and that's almost certainly amplified by works being in translation (though I've had bad experiences with works in translation, this wasn't one). There are some fragmentary-seeming things that don't really resolve, which these days I might be inclined to call "prose poems," and those tend to work less well than the stories, probably because what makes them work in German simply doesn't convey to English.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Vermilion by Molly Tanzer
Got about halfway through this ~380 page book and just ... stopped. I didn't care enough about what was going on in the book, didn...

-
Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with no...
-
This is a surprisingly good thrillerish crime novel--there are elements of twisty whodunit mystery at play, and interesting layers of inno...
-
A breezy, kaleidoscopic, flippant history of the British monarchy through the death of Elizabeth I. A pretty enjoyable read, but there is--...
No comments:
Post a Comment