That’s the opening sentence, in Mark Harman’s new translation, of “Die Verwandlung,” which he calls “The Transformation.” It’s hard to shake our memories of Edwin and Willa Muir’s more famous and poetic title, “The Metamorphosis,” especially with its entomological associations, but if you’ve never read Kafka before or if you already love him, you’ll still want Harman’s “Kafka: Selected Stories.” In its 277 pages, Harman provides a 68-page, illustrated biographical introduction, a bibliography for further reading, extensive interpretive endnotes and, not least, valuable footnotes detailing the linguistic nuances of the German original’s trickier words.
Besides “The Transformation,” nearly all the major stories are here, including “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” “A Country Doctor,” “A Report for an Academy” and “Before the Law,” as well as several minor ones (which I would have traded for “The Hunter Gracchus,” “Investigations of a Dog” and “The Great Wall of China” — but you can’t have everything). It’s an extremely handsome, well-designed book, and you couldn’t ask for a better introduction to Kafka.
While this sickly Jewish-Czech-Austrian literary genius remains unique, we can nonetheless re-experience something of that distinctive Kafkaesque vertigo in the work of a wide range of more or less fabulist writers, some old, some new. Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino spring readily to mind. Yet Kafka is also part of the zeitgeist of our own troubled 21st century. For proof, consider “A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories,” from Catapult Books. Its prizewinning contributors include Tommy Orange, Joshua Cohen, Ali Smith and Helen Oyeyemi, among others, as well as my Book World colleague Becca Rothfeld, who provides a characteristically astute introductory essay.
Long ago, Borges observed that strong authors create their own precursors. In the case of Kafka, one might look back to Georges Rodenbach and his 1892 masterpiece, “Bruges-la-Morte.” It is currently available in Will Stone’s translation from the wonderful Wakefield Press, which specializes in European symbolist fiction and poetry. Illustrated with grainy, period photographs, this short novel begins five years after Hugues Viane’s wife has died. In his grief, he has moved to Bruges, a Flemish city of canals and churches that he finds matches his melancholy. The autumnal opening chapters, underscoring this urban version of the pathetic fallacy — the outside world reflecting our inner state — beautifully evoke the profound loneliness of a man living in the irretrievable past.
One late afternoon, during his daily walk, the grieving Viane glimpses a woman who looks exactly like his dead wife. He shakes off this apparent hallucination but later sees the woman again. From this point on, he grows obsessed with the possibility that, in some way, the love of his life has come back to him. Ultimately, the novel abandons dizzying uncertainty as it morphs into a conte cruel, closing with a kind of poetic justice in its final pages.
Over the past year or two, New York Review Books has been reissuing the fiction of Dino Buzzati in new translations, starting with the allegorical existentialist novel “The Stronghold,” formerly known as “The Tartar Steppe.” In the fall, NYRB will publish Buzzati’s collected stories, reminiscent by turns of Calvino and the absurdist Donald Barthelme. In the meantime, readers should seek out “The Singularity,” in the English version of Anne Milano Appel. (The book was previously titled “Larger Than Life” in an equally fine translation by the poet Henry Reed.)
The novel opens: “In April 1972, Ermanno Ismani, a forty-three-year-old university professor of electronics, received a letter from the Ministry of Defense requesting that he meet with Colonel Giaquino, the head of the research and development division.” Buzzati never lets up on this air of the slightly ominous. It turns out that Ismani has been requested by a supersecret experimental facility to spend two years on a project, the nature of which cannot be revealed to him. The first quarter of the book describes the gradual approach to this highly guarded equivalent of Area 51 and culminates when Ismani meets its director, who exclaims, “We will become masters of the world!”
Gradually, Buzzati threads together several themes: lost love (similar to that in Rodenbach’s novel), the nature of identity, muted eroticism and the development of what we would now call artificial intelligence. The book climaxes in a scene that recalls the ancient myth of the prophetic Sibyl of Cumae, who was granted immortality but not perpetual youth. When asked what she herself wanted, she replied, “I want to die.”
Zoran Zivkovic, the great Serbian fabulist, is among my favorite contemporary writers. Comparisons are invidious but useful: If you like Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy,” you’ll definitely enjoy Zivkovic’s “The Papyrus Trilogy,” in which Inspector Dejan Lukic investigates a series of inexplicable deaths associated with the Papyrus bookshop. Reading Zivkovic, one is reminded, by turns, of magic realism, hypertext fiction, the short stories of Steven Millhauser, old television series such as “The Twilight Zone” and “The Avengers,” and, not least, Kafka, albeit a more playful, lighthearted Kafka. All of Zivkovic’s many books have been published in English by Cadmus Press in a uniform format.
The most recent, “The Four Deaths and One Resurrection of Fyodor Mikhailovich” — translated by Randall A. Major — consists of a quartet of stories that play off the life of the Russian novelist Dostoevsky. In one, Fyodor Mikhailovich accidentally wanders through a portal into the multiverse; in another, he has been murdered in a train’s restaurant car and a vaguely familiar police inspector must solve the crime; in the third, his consciousness is resurrected and installed in an artificial body, and then the great writer orders to make his work more politically correct. (For example, “The Idiot” will now be called “The Naive” but was nearly retitled “The Prince With Special Needs.” Soon, too, there will be “The Sisters Karamazov.”) In the book’s final story, a suicidal Dostoevsky encounters a figure from the future in a Turkish bath.
All these jeux d’esprits are entertaining but relatively uncomplicated, especially when compared with Zivkovic at his head-spinning best (for that try “Impossible Stories”). One could say much the same about C.D. Rose’s “Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea,” a highly varied collection of strange, formally experimental fictions by the author of that playful masterpiece “The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure” and the only slightly less impressive “Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else” and “The Blind Accordionist.”
Shadowy European bars, train station waiting rooms, deserted seasides — these are the settings to which Rose gravitates in his stories, several of which could be labeled “portraits.” We learn about the true inventor of moving pictures long before the Lumiere brothers began their experiments; discover that philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin didn’t kill himself, and instead escaped the Nazis and is now unhappily settled in Southern California; and, most amusing of all, listen in as “St. Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed”: “It’s a good office, the one he has, not as good as Jerome’s, maybe, he knows that, no lion or anything, but pretty good anyhow with the view of the Med and the rolling hills and the ships in the harbour, so he briefly entertains a notion of getting his own lion, and maybe a painting too, and posting that, #hardatworkwithfloofyfriend or something, but quickly changes his mind, that’s not his brand at all, he’s got to stay on brand, and most of all he’s got to get some writing done this morning.”
In “A Brief History of the Short Story,” Rose imagines how French, Russian and American writers would approach the same set of characters and situations. There are some particularly apt observations in the Russian section: “It wasn’t engineers of human souls they were looking for now; it was middle managers.” (Stalin called writers “the engineers of human souls.”) Still, Rose’s most dazzling piece must be “What Remains of Claire Blanck”: It consists entirely of elaborate footnotes at the bottom of blank pages.
And so there you have it. Harman’s edition will give you pure Kafka, while something like a Kafkaesque frisson can be felt in the wide-ranging Catapult anthology as well as books by an 1890s symbolist, a writer of speculative fiction, a Central European fabulist and an English experimental postmodernist. All of these volumes can nonetheless be shelved in the same bookcase — if there’s room — next to Kafka’s (incomplete) novels “Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared),” “The Trial,” and “The Castle,” the letters to his family and girlfriends, Ross Benjamin’s just-published translation of the unexpurgated diaries, and, not least, the invaluable three-volume biography by Reiner Stach. Given such plenty, Kafka has clearly done all right for a guy convinced that his unpublished manuscripts deserved only to be burned.
