Friday short fiction #6: Kafkaesque
André Fromont passe-muraille 2011
I've taken the plunge and decided to explore Kafka this year, mostly so I can gain a better understanding of the full reach of that eponym 'Kafkaesque' which can be applied to situations echoing stories from 'Metamorphosis' all the way to 'The Trial'. But not just Kafka: here are two Kafkaesque shorts, plus two brief ones from the man himself.
Franz Kafka, 'Jackals and Arabs' (DER JUDE, 1917)
A short one, and I like the threatening yet opaque intentions of the jackals in this story, plus Kafka's use of a European outsider as a saviour figure is clever.
Vincent Stall's comic book adaptation of Kafka's one-paragraph story 'A Little Fable'.
Sadegh Hedayat, 'Buried Alive' (1930)
Probably Kafka's biggest literary disciple, and Hedayat's protagonists/antagonists are usually unremittingly indolent and full of self-loathing. This first-person story about a man who repeatedly fails at suicide takes these traits to extremes - it ultimately felt like a half-hour wasted, and the last line is actually a bitter laugh at the reader's expense.
Favourite short story of the week: David Foster Wallace, 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men #6' (THE PARIS REVIEW #144, FALL 1997).
This novelette won for Wallace the 1997 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. It's undoubtedly Kafkaesque in the way a man comes to terms with the horror within, when he discovers that he's categorically no different to a damaged, psychotic rapist. This story has an unusual 'question-and-answer' structure where the questions are left to the reader's imagination, although Wallace didn't let that hinder the flow. It also reminded me strongly of the kind of stories in Barry Lopez's Resistance, which was populated by people resolving intractable problems by thinking and believing unconventionally. This is a brilliant hour-long read, if you have the time.