Czech novelist and short-story writer (1883-1924)

In the 1920s and 1930s people regarded Kafka as an unsmiling neurotic who depicted the human condition as a bureaucratic hell without explanation or compassion: Kafkaesque' was a synonym for nightmarish'. Kafka, by contrast, always regarded himself as a humorist, in the line of such surrealist East European jokers as Gogol. Each of his novels and stories develops a single idea to ludicrous, logical-illogical extremes. In Metamorphosis a man has to cope with the fact that he has turned into a gigantic beetle overnight. The prison-camp commander of In the Penal Colony' is so eager to show off a newly-invented punishment-machine that he turns it on himself. In The Burrow' a creature designs a defence-system of underground tunnels so complex and so perfect that it becomes the whole meaning of existence: it engulfs its own creator. The central figure of The Trial (Der Prozess) is arrested one morning although he has done nothing wrong, spends the book trying to discover the charges against him, and is finally executed without explanation. It is easy to treat such tales as psychological or political allegories. But it is also possible to read them as jokes, grimly funny anecdotes invented just for the hell of it. Perhaps keeping his face straight was Kafka's best trick of all.

THE CASTLE  (1926) An ordinary, unremarkable man, K, arrives in a strange town to take up the post of Land Surveyor. He finds that no one is expecting him, that the town and the castle which dominates it are a labyrinthine bureaucracy where everyone is responsible only for passing the buck to someone else, and each favour done, each door opened, leads only to more confusion. K's efforts to reach the heart of the mystery, to be given some official confirmation of his existence, are doomed, hilarious and have the logic not of reality but of a very bad dream indeed.

Kafka's novels are The Trial, The Castle and America. His short stories have been published in one-volume collected editions and in shorter collections such as Metamorphosis and Other Stories and The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works. Kafka’s correspondence with the two women with whom he conducted complicated and soul-searching relationships gives fascinating insights into this most enigmatic of writers and has been published as Letters to Felice and Letters to Milena..

READ ON

The Trail

America (the story of a naive young German who goes to the USA thinking that its streets are paved with gold, and goes on believing it despite being cheated and betrayed by everyone he meets)

To The Trail : see also pathway

Echoing Kafka's humour : Jaroslav HaÜek, The Good Soldier Svejk Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Joe Orton, Head to Toe Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell

Echoing the idea of a 'Kafkaesque', nightmare society : Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller Alasdair Gray, Lanark George Orwell, 1984 Rex Warner, The Aerodrome