title, what title?

First time I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it stroke a chord in me. It was as if the person I wanted to be in secret was out there doing the talking for me. When I first read Kafka, I felt that Kafka was to Garcia Marques, what Garcia Marquez to me. It would be a stretch to take this one step further with Robert Walser and Kafka, but it is no secret that Kafka read out Walser loud and laughed his guts out, and the first few pages of Geschwister Tänner struck a chord in me too. His life story is very interesting and sad at the same time. He spent a great deal of time in Weimarer Berlin, sitting in the Cafés and Bars, meticulously observed and wrote about the "creative" types there, something that I wish I had the time for when I was in Berlin. One time he went to a private school to become a butler. In the end, he was sent to the mental hospital, where he devised his own writing style and wrote what the experts now call his Micrographs, that contain stories fittin...

Heutzutage verbringe ich viel Zeit vor dem Computer. Ich meine nicht die Zeit, während der ich etwas produktiv mache. Ich meine die Zeit, während der ich darauf warte, dass die Ergebnisse der Tests für meine Dissertation-Software fertig sind. Ich habe mir  vorgenommen, diese Zeit für einen guten Zweck zu benutzen. Wie Ihr in diesen Zeilen bemerken werdet, hat sich mein Deutsch in letzter Zeit verschlechtert. Ich werde versuchen, minimal ein mal pro Woche einen Eintrag auf Deutsch zu schreiben, mit der Hoffnung auf eine Verbesserung. Dies Mal geht es um meinen Lieblings-deutschsprachigen Schriftsteller Franz Kafka. Zufälligerweise habe ich vorgestern in einem Buchladen ein Hörbuch mit zwei Novellen von Kafka entdeckt. Dies schien Mir es eine gute Methode zu sein, meine Deutsch-Aussprache zu verbessern. Ich kaufte das Hörbuch sofort. Mich täuschte die Aussprache in diesem Hörbuch tatsächlich nicht. Es war mein erstes Hörbuch - nein, die Hörbücher sind nicht so b...

In my humble opinion, Kafka's Das Schloss is the best embodiment the human condition in the age we call modern. Coming from a land, who is trying to come in terms with its modernization project, it has been a constant intellectual quest for me to understand what modernity exactly means, and why of all the places it started in Europe. The classical explanations put almost all the time Europe in a special place. Modernism could only have started in Europe. And they choose a property of Europe of their ideological liking, and try to demonstrate it only existed in Europe. This is, in my opinion, a reversal of scientific method. So the lead essay in this months CATO Unbound discussion series by Stephen Davies a fresh wind in my face. It explains the modernity as an emergent phenomenon that is in some way contingent, rather than a result of Europe's special place. This also brings the question whether or not the term Western Civilization makes sense anymore.. I recommend this articl...

"One time, a lonely cage went looking for a bird." Franz Kafka was born 125 years ago this day. Read Kafka, ask questions.

After a long, somehow slow, but tasteful period of reading I've just finished Kafka's The Castle . I read it in German, which is something I recommend to those who can, as the English translation of this never completed work is a Kafkaesque tale itself. The German is so free flowing, and free of cold long sentences, that even reading out loud and listening to flow of the words is a pleasure itself. The tale of a land-surveyor who is not a land-surveyor who is lost in the Maelstrom of his choices amidst the calm and dark waters of a perfect Bureaucracy which is not perfect definitely took the place of 100 Years of Solitude as the best book I've read. On the "screenplay" side -where the screen is inside my mind- the tragicomic scenes exceed the Marquez works, to the point where I laughed to the absurdity. However the surreality in the Castle is not magical like in Marquez works. They are so real that you feel you should simply -or maybe forcefully- accept them. W...

Literary critics cannot agree how to read Kafka after all these years. There are many different readings of his masterpiece "The Castle", ranging from Marxism to magical realism. Being a big Gabriel Garcia Marquez fan, I tend to agree with the magical realist reading. However there is a crucial point to make. If the magician in Marquez's magical realism is the sort of the magician that Gandalf is in Lord of The Rings, entertaining the young Hobits with his tricks, than the magician of Kafka is a dark one, a dark Voodo sorcerer jailing his victims to the depths of their inner fears. Still the Castle pulls me this moment from the side of my bed...