title, what title?

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...

My favorite author of all time, and arguably one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Gabriel Garcia Marquez turned 80 today. 2007 is also remarkably 40th anniversary of his masterpiece 100 Years of Solitude, a book where he writes the history of the human civilization while masterfully ornamenting the story with magical happenings like a beautiful girl who simply is taken back to heaven because of their beauty, or a drought lasting 8 years, and 25th anniversary of his Nobel Literature prize. A Colombian friend once told me a TV interview of the master where he likened his writings to cooking a soup of words, stirring the soup and tasting it and carefully adding words to reach the correct taste. It is exactly how I felt about his books, his words inspire complex tastes in my body... From his stories such as "Nabo, the Man Who Made the Angels Wait"- which tells of a black boy who refuses to die to sing- "Blacaman the Good, the Vendor of Miracles" - t...