KafkaesqueHis most enduring works include The Metamorphosis; a story about a travelling salesman, George Samsa, who wakes to find himself transformed into a giant fly-type insect. Kafka talks to the reader in terms of nightmarish visions, via a dream-like state where anything could happen for no apparent reason: the chaos theory of literature.Resembling situations from the writings of Franz Kafka, marked by a disorienting, senseless and often menacing complexity (1883-1924), German-speaking Jewish novelist born in Prague, Austria-Hungary.
Possibly my favourite of his novels is The Trial. It's here we see the precursor to the Orwell's 1984. The protagonist in this hell is arrested, but has no idea why or even, by whom. The sense of disorientation is perhaps best illustrated in this scene when he visits the painter, Titorelli;
“…he rushed after her, seized her by the skirts, whirled her once around her head and then set her down before the door among the other girls…”As far as sense and understanding goes, it flies out of the window. We are in the same dream-like state that Kafka has created, and the laws by which he is writing are transcended for the greater good of this fictive dream, and does it work? Hell, yes. What Kafka does is place the reader squarely in the nightmare reality of Joseph K, to feel his confusion, his isolation, as he finds himself at the mercy of totalitarian rule. Reading the novel isn't a light undertaking, this is no Alice in Wonderland. Upon entering the dream, the reader is immediately filled with a sense of unease, not least because it touches our most basic humanistic fears.
Reading a Kafka novel is the equivalent of finding the normative from the chaos that is M C Escher's Relativity
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