The problem with an anthology of stories built around Franz Kafka is that they will inevitably be compared to Kafka, and in that comparison damn near everyone comes up short. One of the most wonderful things about the anthology Kafkaesque, then is that so many of the stories in it do hold up, making the book less of a tribute album and more of an exploration of Kafka’s style, influence, and enduring personality.
The last actually comes through more strongly than one might expect. While the notion of taking historical authors and making literary characters out of them goes back at least as far as Alighieri, Kafka would at first seem like an unlikely choice for the treatment. After all, he had a boring day job, was terrible at relationships, and died relatively young. Only the instructions he left concerning his manuscripts offer the slightest hint of intrigue, and yet here we have Tamar Yellin postulating Kafka as an aged and reclusive neighbor on the moors of England, Phillip Roth setting up Kafka as his Hebrew school instructor, Lethem and SCholz’s Kafka-as-Hollywood screenwriter, and Paul Di Filippo’s costumed crimefighter Jackdaw, who spends his days as a mild-mannered but increasingly inscrutable advice columnist.
The implication is that Kafka is alternately a blank canvas onto which many things can be projected, or the projection itself, endlessly variable in content. Wisely, editors John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly don’t try to nail down anything as limiting as a formal definition, instead casting their net wide and letting the reader decide what Kafka means to them from the offerings.
Setting aside Kafka’s own “A Hunger Artist” – both in text format and R. Crumb illustrated versions, perhaps the strongest thematic grouping of stories are the ones that reach for the notion of the Kafka-esque, contrasting human interaction with impersonal monolithic absurdity. Borges’ “The Lottery In Babylon” is a masterful take on this approach, an ever-more delicately balanced construct laying out the impossible rules of day-to-day life in Borges’ mythic Babylon. J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” offers no answers as to where the titan of the title comes from. Instead, it derives its power from the interactions of the local and human with this unresponsive piece of the massive and otherworldly. Damon Knight’s “The Handler” goes the opposite way and brings Kafka into a backroom bar, where nobody remarks on the idea of a little man driving an automaton of a big one. They just like the big guy better than the real man inside. Stories by Theodora Goss and Michael Blumlein also fall roughly in this demesne; the latter’s “Hymenoptera” is about a fashion designer’s work with a massive wasp that mysteriously appears in his studio, while the former’s “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” postulates a dehumanizing revolution of a very different kind.
Less imposing are the attempts at reworking Kafka stories in a new context. The clear winner here is “The Metamorphosis”, which stands as inspiration for most of the tales in this category. Carol Emshwiller’s “Report to the Men’s Club” puts a savage gender twist on “A Report To An Academy”, while T. C. Boyle’s “The Big Garage” takes “The Trial” and puts it in a somewhat more Americanized setting. But it’s the cockroach that gets the double dip, with Terry Bisson’s brutally off-kilter “The Cockroach Hat” and Eileen Gunn’s enjoyable but more conventionally structured “Stable Strategies for Middle Management”.
And then there are stories about Kafka himself, or Kafka as he might have been. These, most of all, are a matter of personal taste, as they have no unifying theme or tone beyond Kafka’s sometimes unwilling participation as a character. If you prefer your Kafka subdued and largely offscreen, then Roth’s “’I Always Wanted You To Admire My Fasting’; Or, Looking at Kafka” and Yellin’s “Kafka in Bronteland” are the way to go, as the narrator of each tale uses a largely unseen Kafka as a jumping-off point for personal reflection. Readers wanting a more outré version of the author will more likely gravitate toward’s Rudy Rucker’s Frankensteinian horror tale “The 57th Franz Kafka”, or the glib pulp fantasy of Di Fillipo’s “The Jackdaw’s Last Case”. And those looking for a grounded, realistic Kafka in Context may want to explore the conceit of Kafka serving as Frank Capra’s financially ruinous muse in “Receding Horizon”. But even this breakdown doesn’t quite work; the utterly mundane Kafka of Scholz’s “The Amount To Carry” meets Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives at an insurance conference, but does so in a hotel that defies description, common sense, and the laws of physics.
The likelihood that any given reader will like every piece and take on Kafka that the book provides is slim. The likelihood than every given reader will find something in the book, however, that serves as a gateway to, an exploration of, or an elaboration upon Kafka, however, is high. Endlessly challenging, occasionally transcendent, Kafkaesque is a highly personalized, but rewarding reading experience.
(Tachyon, 2011)
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