Amerika in Never too Late to Read Classics

Sep 05, 2012 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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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 shatter 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. 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. ...more

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