Amerika

Taken for what it is, an unfinished novel, Amerika is a well-written critique of the American Dream and experience. To call this work stereotypical in any way is to forget when it was written and its literary point. This novel was written decades before the immigrant story was mass-marketed as paperback and Hollywood film, so if you're believing nothing here is "new," it might just be you're forgetting many of these elements come from books like Amerika and you're missing the point. Kafka is neither extolling America, its capitalistic practises and division of social classes, or explicitly condemning them. He is presenting readers with the story of this young man and how America transforms him ideologically and otherwise. This is not a show more novel about how wondrous is America or how easy life becomes for European emigrants once they step off the boat. It's amusing that Kafka had never visited the country, yet managed to write a tale which details the life of an immigrant so well. Karl is someone with whom readers are able to identify no matter their backgrounds or positions in life. The characters are dynamic and whether you love or hate them, you'll find your fingers flipping through pages long after you've decided to take a break.

There is a sense of feeling lost and alone throughout most of the novel which both reflects the writer himself and speaks to the experience of leaving one's home for a strange land. Certain choices made by Karl are to gain friendship or secure a situation where he will no longer be alone, yet he often finds himself worse off than before. This plays into Kafka's sense of guilt and duty as, no matter how cruel and misleading people are to him, Karl always feels as if he is the one who has done wrong. This helps show a major contrast between people like Karl who have recently arrived and people such as Robinson and Delamarche who have been in America for quite some time. This new country makes men into something entirely different than they would be in their homelands and I think Kafka might have discovered this as he continued the story, since Karl loses his blind optimism, such as the belief held by Kafka that Americans are constantly smiling and happy, and develops an ability to transcend his guilt to better his situation towards the end of the novel.

Are there fantastical elements to Amerika? Yes, but that is to be expected with Kafka and one would be mistaken to discredit this novel because certain situations might appear a little hard to believe. The ending is indeed optimistic so far as Kafka goes, but I think that is what makes this a poignant, engaging story. I would almost say this might be the ending he would have chosen had he been able to finish the novel because readers are left with nothing but an open landscape and a hopeful idea of what's to come. show less

I honestly didn't know what to expect getting into this book. Having read both The Trial and The Castle and having been told that this book was much lighter in both content and style than those two books, but still given that this was Franz Kafka, I went in more or less blind. A part of me was scared that this book wouldn't live up to the standard set, destroyed, and destroyed again by the other books (to sum up, they were both sublime, beyond compare, pristine perfect mirrors broken and shattered again and again) and that this text would be the runt of the litter.

But I was, and I'm thankful to what knows what, very wrong. This book in effect completes the trinity.

I've used the word heartbreaking a few times in describing Franz Kakfa. show more And for good reason, the man seemed born into solitude both hot with his keen, almost supernatural awareness of not only his own perpetual distance from everything that constituted him (his being culturally Czech, his language of choice being German, his being Jewish in a community of mostly gentiles) but also cold with his obsessive and at times even dreadful curiosity about those same factors which both defined him and enslaved him. And this is reflected in all of his works. He was an individual born of singular circumstances with a mind that, seemingly, the more it developed, the more it set him aside from everything around him while simultaneously grounding him in the bricks and airs of Prague.

According to the preface of my edition Kafka wrote Amerika as a bit of a homage/response to the works of Charles Dickens (whom I personally can't stand, but then I dislike most Victorian era lit) and this is clear in the the depiction of the protagonist Karl Rossman who despite being used and abused by a good portion of the people he encounters, as well as being tread on by just plain unfortunate circumstances, never seems to quite lose his overall positive outlook on his new life in America. This is immediately tempered though by one of the factors that separates Kafka from Dickens. Karl possesses a nervous dread and self destructive thought process that usually permeates the atmosphere of Kafka's settings and where as a character/protagonist like Pip from Great Expectations has a guilt from his 'original crime' Karl's angst comes from a more existential source, that each encounter with every new character or challenge means a new chance for betrayal or abuse, with all blame for his pain to be placed squarely on his shoulders. Pip seems to be physically and mentally whole, while Karl, though bodily whole, is mentally an ever-shifting shambles of tempestuous over analysis and pain, distinctly Kafkaesque.

But, like it's been said, this book is much much lighter fare than Trial or Castle. More easily readable too. And genuinely funny as well, though Trial and Castle were both that as well though more in the gallows spirit of the word.

Amerika shines a none too flattering light on humanity and its foibles. The people in Kafka's America (much like his ambiguous European settings of prior stories) lie, cheat, steal, abuse one another, and take comfort in piling their accrued sins on the bony shoulders of an all too willing scapegoat, namely Rossman. There are some characters who take Rossman's side but are usually brutish in other ways or fall victim to the poisoned counsel of those aforementioned 'blackguard' kinds of characters.

Does Kafka give us hope here? Even in the, like his other two novels, unfinished state of this story? I think hope or redemption or the promise of something better, these terms and ideas are too strong and imprecise and ultimately impotent as rhetoric to be applicable here. But what he gives us is something much more elusive as it is more than what we as species deserve but simultaneously more than what most of us are capable of possessing as it is something that transcends everything we've ever been told is integral to our senses of identity and personal integrity.

It's in the final scene where Karl is on the train heading towards a new job and a brighter future, where the last line "...and they were so near that the breath of coldness rising from them (mountain streams) chilled the skin of one's face," that I feel Kafka gives us this 'something'. It's not hope he preaches. It's something akin to awareness combined with resignation, but also deep determination to live despite all the pain that is inevitable, be it beneficial suffering of the Doystoyevskan variety or the pointless absurd crushing of later Camus. Why live? Why not choose to die? Or simply roll over and accept? Because we have our minds and our lives and a future that awaits them both that no people, no bureaucracy, no God can touch. By rights secular and divine we have this. And this terrifies the shit out those smart enough or cursed enough to be aware of it.

It goes without saying that not everyone got this or even anything good from this novel (some of my fellow reviewers are damn brutal, but hey, who isn't at some point?. Make of it what you will but given my own personal circumstances this book, along with so many of Kafka's others, rang so true regarding isolation, and those small moments of human kindness and solitary peace that can only be found at the other end of obsessive dread and deathly over-analysis that I felt almost aghast with the both how painful and how sweet Kafka could and can describe the workings of the mind and the world around it that I was and have been repeatedly overjoyed and saddened. The former that this writer had lived. The latter that he had lived as he did and died in so undeservedly wretched a manner.

But Kafka lived, he lived and he wrote. And if I'm thankful for anything right now, it's that fact, humbling, dreadful, but also wonderful, even revelatory. show less

Franz Kafka broke off writing his first novel, Amerika, on January 24, 1913. Though one of the most famous stay-at-homes in literature, Kafka read widely including travel books. His absurdist novel Amerika begins with young Karl viewing the Statue of Liberty and feeling "the free winds of heaven” on his face. Within moments he is lost in the maze of the multiple levels of the ship looking for an umbrella he left behind. While this reminded me of Alice's initial fall into the rabbit hole it also alerted me that I was in a Kafka novel, albeit a slightly different type than I had read before.

The United States that Kafka depicts is more based upon myth than any real experience of the place. Certain odd details reveal one Continental show more impression of this land at a time when so many Eastern Europeans were emigrating. Drawing on a host of sources—including Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and the poetry of Walt Whitman—and calling to the reader’s mind an even more formidable array of literary analogues—from William Shakespeare’s one play set in the Americas, The Tempest, to Henry James’s international novels, Kafka conjures an America more fabulous than factual. Appropriately enough, in Kafka’s America much of the action takes place in the deepest night, at the deepest levels of the subconscious and of the spirit.

Kafka seemed to intuit that being someone, or anyone, in the geographical vastness of America was not altogether different from the problem of being someone in the bureaucratic vastness of German-dominated Prague. Establishing an identity was, moreover, a problem compounded by the question of home, a question that was important both to the immigrant and to the Czech. “I want above all to get home,” Karl points out early in the novel. By “home,” he literally means the house of his Uncle Jacob but, figuratively, he is referring to that dream of a familiar place where he will feel secure, understood, accepted: the garden from which Karl, like Adam, has been banished. Because of his original sin, he has been condemned to wander the earth in search not only of a home, or refuge, but of justice and mercy as well. As he comes to realize, however momentarily, “It’s impossible to defend oneself where there is no good will.” What this sudden revelation suggests is that the absence of mercy, whether human or divine, makes justice impossible. Just as important, this situation renders all Karl’s efforts not only existentially futile but—and this is Kafka’s genius—comically absurd as well. The chance encounters that characterize the novel, the arbitrary exercise of authority by those who are in power (parents, uncles, head porters, and the like),the uncertain rules and regulations, and the various characters’—especially Karl’s—precarious status constitute Kafka’s fictional world.

That the Statue of Liberty holds aloft a sword instead of a torch and that a bridge connects New York City and Boston unsettle the reading by placing an essentially realist novel close to the realm of fantasy. Much of that fantasy is dark and disturbing, but by the end — first editor Max Brod says Kafka quit while on his intended last chapter — Karl has reached the wide open West, where he seems reborn as a bit actor in “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” Kafka would go on to write better and more labyrinthine tales, but his first novel is an intriguing vision of America. show less

Die Poesie dieses Texts berührt mich wie Flutlicht: schmerzhaft leuchtend.
Anders als in kürzeren Werken Kafkas ist die Atmosphäre eine vielschichtigere als nur die von Dunkelheit und Beengung. Im Grunde erinnert sie mich an eine Zeile von der Rapperin Sookee: "Die Welt ist kaputt, aber Hoffnung ist da."
Das Verlieren des Koffers und anderer Gegenstände scheint mir eine Metapher für den Verlust von vormals selbst-definierenden Eigenschaften, ein neuerliches Geworfen-Werden in die Welt. Und doch findet Karl immer wieder neue Bezüge zu sich selbst und stolpert geradezu über Chancen - womöglich nur, weil er über alles Leid hinweg aktiv bleibt und sich eben nicht determiniert fühlt.
In der Tat scheint mir das Buch, womit ich bei show more Kafka nicht gerechnet habe, recht optimistisch, ohne in die Naivität abzudriften.
Schade nur, dass es ein Fragment geblieben ist. Die Ausschnitte über das Theater scheinen sehr vielversprechend und erinnern mich selbst an das magische Theater in Hesses "Steppenwolf". show less

From the moment Karl Rossman set his eyes on the statue of liberty you realize that nothing good expected to be there in the land of opportunities for him! One might fairly say of course you won't! It's Kafka! But that won't change the reality of the kind of troubles a 16 year old would face in a strange land packed with newcomers who are looking to find happiness and wealth in every possible way.
Karl is not there by his own will, being sent away from home for a mistake he made makes everything more complex. It doesn't matter if he is guilty of it or not, he is now there and need to survive.
It is so impressive how the writer illustrates a land he never been in. When the communications between the nations was not as strong as what it is show more now, while there was no TV or YouTube to learn the stuff from! But he does it in amazing detail. How people turn into what they never wanted to be and how the challenges of the new world make a slave out of them might somehow seem pessimistic but one cannot deny its reality.
The idea of reading all Kafka materials has always been bugging me in a way! Being aware that I am reading something the been left incomplete is disturbing to me! But in Amerika he did not need to finish the book to make a sense out of it. show less

"Het heeft geen zin om je te verdedigen als de goede wil ontbreekt." Pijnlijk zoals alleen Kafka dat kan zijn.

Here's what I wrote after reading in 1985: "Hmmmm. . . . Beyond poviding an insight into an Austrian's view of an America he (Kafka) had never seen, this book did little for me. Perhaps more background on Kafka himself would better enable me to understand his "genius"." Well, it was a humorous book that played with Kafka's themes of oppression by a system. Apparently, many of the situations described in the book were encountered by Kafka's relatives who has emigrated to the Unimted States