Where Are All the Baby Roaches?

Zadie Smith asks what we've all been to afraid to: where are Kafka's heirs?




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I'll tell you where they are. They're sitting in the slush pile waiting for a rejection letter from a large, commercial publishing house looking for the next Oprah book.

Human, all-too-human...

I would like to think that Kafka has his lineage in Celine, Bukowsksi, Hamsun, Cendrars, Madox Ford and that happy lot. It is truly difficult to conjure a female equivalent; perhaps the 'gentler' sex is too busy nurturing to annihilate? Haven't read any Zadie Smith but I can't imagine she'd be so popular if she wrote like Kafka. People prefer deathly long sepia toned family secrets posing as faux history these days. Darbyshire's Please is the closest I've read lately to what one might call Canadian existentialism, and yet the dissipated geography lends itself so well to such thoughts, doesn't it?

What about Tony Burgess and Derek McCormack? If not them, do we have to look to scifi/horror writers for this? What about Americans like Palahniuk or Gaiman?

J.J. Steinfeld: "Every morning Steinfeld checks to see if he hasn't metamorphosed into a giant insect."

Edited by author 10-27-2003 01:02 PM
I would advance the name of one José Saramago, though his work displays a moral authority that is pretty much altogether absent in Kafka. But the solipsistic impossibility of living? There in spades, especially in "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" and "All the Names". Although these are contradicted by the optimism--yes, optimism!--of books like "Blindness", "Baltasar and Blimunda", "The Stone Raft", and "The History of the Siege of Lisbon". The last of the four, especially, marks the emergence of a protagonist from solipsistic negation into communal participation and love.

Amendment: The first two Saramago books see the solipsistic protagonist emerge from his warren, too. Perhaps this is why I find Saramago ultimately more satisfying than Kafka. Any other Saramago nuts out there?

"About a dozen young men attending the ceremony wore black suits, ties and hats - the apparel Kafka wore."

Apparently a certain reactionary US based "literary" group was in attendance for this latest Kafka erection.



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"We'd Be Just as Happy if We Had No Books at All"

Kafka on Books. (LOL* Languagehat)



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I've had this passage from Kafka's letter to Pollack plastered to my wall for years. The stone cold truth.

I'm reading Kafka's "Letters to Milena" right now. It's hard to imagine someone who lived more intensely than he did--without being certifiable. And a clerk! Imagine a world in which all bank tellers were Kafka.

Zach, somewhere deep inside their lives of quiet desperation (thanks to Thoreau), I'm sure all bank tellers are Kafka.

Ebo, you're making me think of Warren Pryor.

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