anyone read it?

>>8954119
I like Kafka, and I liked Amerika.
One of his best finished works, although both the Trial and Metamorphoses were better overall in my opinion.

Was more of a fun read than anything, though it does have merit

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>>8954171
>One of his best finished works

I'm like 60 pages in, bit boring atm

>>8954119
I loved it. After you've finished it, make sure you read about the final chapter that Kafka had planned but never finished. It's somewhere on Amerika's wikipedia page. You'll love the book even more.

>>8954119
I love Amerika. I am biased, I love Kafka.
Amerika is a strange novel though, and a hard recommendation even to admirers of Kafka's other two novels. It is less straightforward in its absurdism, which makes it paradoxically disarming. It has been called Kafka doing Dickens, of whom he was a great fan, only there lacks the moral fibre that might imply. The novel has often been treated as political critique, but I think to wrangle it into something as simple as Marxist parable (though there are hints of class consciousness to be sure!) is to miss the point.

It is a road story, it is an arrogant Karl Rossman being pushed around from Europe to America, from economic class to class, from city to city, at the mercy of wild Fortune under rule of Kafka's pen. It is something like a picaresque anti-novel, there is no real arc, - neither the rise to power or damned under the system narratives we might expect form an immigration story - perhaps no real themes, and certainly nothing like a satisfying end. What there is, is a series of some of Kafka's best individual scenes linked by one of Kafka's haughty novel protagonists.

My ultimate recommendation is to read the short story "The Stoker", which later became the first chapter for Amerika, and if you feel enticed to see where Karl Rossman's journeys take him at the short story's end (though I would argue it is an entirely satisfying story on its own) then read Amerika.

>>8954171
>One of his best finished works
Amerika is unfinished

>>8954517
Good post. I might have to reread it now :)

The most 'important' thing about Amerika in my view is The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. This text is a standalone short story like The Stoker. Amerika is Kafka's romanticisation of the child's desire to run away from home. Anyone who is familiar with Kafka knows that this is an unrealised desire he himself carried up to his death. At various points in his life he wanted to move to Germany to become a journalist, to Palestine as a subsistence farmer-settler, or to America where he remarks in his diaries that life sounded more pleasant and idle. Kafka's desire to move had a lot to do with the fact that his living situation wasn't conducive to writing. You could say that Kafka's biggest yearning was the /literary lifestyle/.

The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma combines Kafka's yearning for freedom from his family yolk with another common infantile fantasy, that is the desire to join the circus. But it was a particular kind of circus that Kafka envisaged, one based on Yiddish theatre troupes. Kafka's circus was what the modern Western reader would associate with a gypsie-like nomadic existence, but more importantly, a communal style of living. In other words, the Nature Theatre, in which everybody was guaranteed employment that suited their talents, was Kafka pre-emoting the Marxist utopian projects of the 20th century. Marxist Utopianism was the only possible world where a Kafka protagonist could arrive at a happy ending, one in which his individuality and creative inclinations were subsidised by the state. At the same time, Karl Rossmann, like anyone who is critical of Utopianism, never entirely lost his skepticism about the Nature Theatre, repeatedly asking how it was financially feasible for the Theatre to support so many idle creatives and still turn a profit.

>>8954620
Thanks for this post, anon. Posts like these are why I'm still lurking /lit/.

Where do I pick up Kafka?

probably not

>>8954119
i read it
it's likeable
pretty light-hearted
was jealous of his independence
read it on my 23rd birthday

>>8954662
The Trial or collected stories

>>8954119
This was the first Kafka I read and I found it very boring. So much so that I didn't see what the big deal about Kafka is.

Years late I picked up other Kafka and found out exactly what the big deal is.

>>8954620
Great post desu
I agree, the nature theatre is the most interesting part of the novel
and the woman who bears a resemblance to josephine the singer i think from that one short story

>>8954230
compared to what? Have you read other Kafka books before?

>>8954662

Start with his shorter stories like The Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist and In The Penal Colony.

>>8954896
This

>>8954517
>It has been called Kafka doing Dickens
Kafka himself said that he was doing Dickens set to modern times, which produces important and interesting differences. It's therefore also quite an atypical Kafka story and its components differ as well. It indeed critiques capitalism and modernity.

>>8954517
Amerika is great and a must-read if you're interested in Kafka. Would recommend to read his other works first though, end with Amerika and Schloss.