Kafka Americana: Fiction

I read this right after finishing a complete collection of Kafka's shorter works, and I kind of think that's what these guys had done right before they wrote these pieces. They're riddled with references to Kafka's work. References to the novels were pretty obvious and inevitable, but there was a good bit of "Josephine the Singer", "In the Penal Colony", "The Burrow", "The Judgement" and "The Vulture". Those are just the ones I caught. What they actually do with these references is not necessarily all that satisfying. I found "Receding Horizons" (the long-ish piece co-written by both) and "K for Fake" (by Lethem alone) to be the most worthwhile. I enjoyed the idea of having Kafka (who invented so much of what we think of as uniquely show more 20th Century angst) survive to experience a bit more of that Century.
It wasn't mind-blowing but it was also only 100 pages. It's not like I'm underwhelmed after enduring a dense, discursive tome. They knew how much material they could get out of the subject-matter and the concept. show less

This slender collection of collaborative and individual co-optations of Kafka forms a nice set. Stories range from Lethem's "The Notebooks of Bob K," which tires me in a way that reminds me that I once had boundless enthusiasm for postmodern experiments, to the co-written "Receding Horizon." Though still studded with post-modern asides that don't particularly enhance the narrative, this piece made me gasp aloud through its brilliant identification of, and play with, similarities between Kafka's "The Judgment" and Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. Yes, really. In its attention to the bizarre distortions of perception and story incumbent upon even the most stolid translation from literature to film, "Receding Horizon" also evokes Christopher show more Isherwood's Prater Violet(Isherwood's fictionalized account of working on the script for the film Little Friend). Read this collection, then refresh yourself with Barthelme's more accessible stories in the delicious Sixty Stories. show less

Collects five stories of the absurd and fantastical.

Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor (*** 1/2) interesting twists

The Notebooks of Bob K. (*) superhero fluff, signifying nothing

Receding Horizon (**) Boring, absurd account of Frank Capra's career in film. Skipped to the end after half finished.

The Amount To Carry (*) Unappealing elite insurance men muse about their meaning.

K for Fake (** 1/2) Another absurdist trial for Kafka with some interesting fantastical elements.

This is definitely not my flavor of writing and perhaps if Kafka's novels were fresher in my memory I could have gained more from reading the stories. I was constantly distracted from reading the stories with thoughts of, "what's the point?"

A quick and satisfying read. Lethem has a fantastic imagination.

I wrote a review of this book and it can be found here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/_1qsqsuzy8itx3/hub/A-Time-For-Fists