A Month of Short Stories and Their Authors July 2nd: Franz Kafka, "The Judgment"

now reading: Best Short Stories/Die schönsten Erzählungen, A Dual-Language Book
by Franz Kafka (ed. and trans. by Stanley Appelbaum)
+ like 6 other books at the same time, but it's not as bad as it sounds

Yesterday as July commenced I explained that I have (yet) a(nother) little reading project wherein I shall read and reflect on one short story and/or its author per day throughout July. We kicked it off with Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings" and my jabber about both my experience reading her novels and how I totally hated/didn't get The Handmaid's Tale upon first reading it. Today, we continue with another author I've read before, the mighty Franz Kafka. Since I have the abovementioned book of his stories checked out from the library right now and it's due back in a week or two, he shall be my story of the day author a few times this month. (By the way, I think the word "erzählungen" is more like "narrative" or "story" than "short story" as we know that term in English; am I right, my fluent German peeps?)

Today's Story: "The Judgment"/"Das Urteil"
Author: Franz Kafka
My rating:  A -

First of all, let's start by saying that the word "judgment" drives me crazy because I never know how to spell it. Everyone has that one word that they can never feel they are spelling correctly (well, everyone except you people who suck at spelling, who presumably have lots of words like that) and mine has always been "judgment" although the thing is that it can also be spelled "judgement" and therein lies the problem. For years I would write one and then the other, but no matter what I wrote, it felt wrong. Only to find out both are right. Argh. However, since this book/translator goes with no 'E' we shall do the same in this blog entry.

Although "The Judgment" is weird, it is immensely likable. What do I mean by "weird"? Well, this is Kafka, after all. But it's not absurd-weird or non-linear-weird or magical-realism-weird, it's more like emotional "What just happened?" weird. I don't want to give spoilers, but I will say that when the father gets angry and "judges" I found myself very confused. What is he mad about? Was he pretending not to know the friend, or was he really going crazy? And then there's all the stuff leading up to that: I really had no idea what to make of it, either, namely the relationship between Georg and his friend. Is this supposed to be a closet homosexual thing, and that's why he doesn't want to announce the engagement?  I mean, color me severely confused. And yet! The confusion in no way makes you want to not read the story or throw the book across the room or anything like that. You just keep reading and reading and get right on to the end and you think, "Whoa!" and only then do you ask, "Wait, why did that all just happen? What does it mean?"  (Like life?)

Therefore, confused about what the actions of the story mean on the surface, I happily turn to the symbolic realm, which is where Kafka's real writing genius lies, no? The friend is the true inner Kafka...bachelorhood is Kafka's writing/art/career/life's purpose from which engagement will snatch him away...the father is perhaps a god-like ultimate Judge, perhaps the judge within Kafka himself...the bridge is all that connects two people...

And speaking of that bridge, a cursory "what the heck just happened?" internet search upon finishing reading "The Judgment" leads me to many different literary critics (plus, even Wikipedia goes there) who point out that the German word "Verkehr" can mean both "traffic" and "intercourse, of the sexual variety" and that word's appearance in the end of the story is thus fraught with all kinds of meaning. Which is interesting, but I still see the bridge as having a lot of layers, not just one sexually symbolic point, especially because Georg stares at it in the beginning of the story after finishing his letter.

I do love the German language. German was the first foreign language that I studied, and I'm really sad that I could take only two years of it in high school (there wasn't enough student interest for a third year class my junior year, sadly, as SO many high-schoolers dutifully took the two years that look good on a college application and then bailed) and I'm even sadder that as I then studied French, and began dabbling in other languages, I let my mad German skills slip away. I need to rekindle them. Anyway, in this particular story I loved the word  korrespondenzverhältnis, which describes the relationship between Georg and his friend who is off living in St. Petersburg, so they only communicate by letter these days. Correspondence-relationship doesn't have nearly the same ring in English (not to mention it's not a word), but in my life I have totally had a korrespondenzverhältnis or two. He knows his friend -- they grew up together or whatever -- but now they are living in two different countries so they have a korrespondenzverhältnis. Maybe this just speaks strongly to my expat soul or my adolescent dozens-of-pen-pals soul, but I've had several other korrespondenzverhältnis, too, in which my relationship with a friend or family member became truly richer and deeper through letters, after or in between seeing them in person. I miss writing letters, damn it!!!

Franz Kafka. Just as with yesterday's Margaret Atwood whose famous The Handmaid's Tale was the first thing I read by her, the first Kafka I ever read was his mega-famous "The Metamorphosis," back in the AP English day. I've since also read The Trial, but I *think* that's it for the Kafka and me. (I know -- pathetic. I don't know why people think I could ever qualify as a literary snob, having read so little Kafka, not to mention less than half of Atwood's oeuvre. What the heck, people?) I liked "The Metamorphosis,"  although I kind of recall not love-loving it (it sure beat the hell out of Faulkner, though, I'll give it that!) because I wanted the weirdness to be more wacky and fun instead of darkly brooding and stuff. You have to understand that my sister was two years ahead of me in school and therefore in English literature classes, so she was forever dropping hints about things I would get around to a couple years later (in some cases the hints became major spoilers, i.e, SPOILER ALERT Anna Karenina and her train, while other times the hints just allowed me to be a particularly precocious high school freshman, randomly dropping Beowulf into conversation with other juniors who I knew were in my sister's English class when she wasn't around).  So she had talked up this story about "a guy who turns into a cockroach" and one does not easily forget that, now does one? After two years of interpretation, I suppose in my head it had become incredibly grotesque and cartoonish and spectacular, but really it's kind of sad and drudgery-laden. (I repeat: like life?)

Anyway, "The Metamorphosis" ("Die Verwandlung") is in this library book I have checked out now, so I'll reread it this week and see how it and I have aged since high school. The Trial was also weird, but not absurd-weird or magic-weird or wacky-weird, just more "What's happening here?" with an eerie calm hanging over it all. (Again: government, society, life.) Kafka is one of those authors who is constantly on my to-read-more-of list that I stupidly never get around to reading more of. I'm glad to remedy that at least a tiny bit this month!

Potpourri of February/March Reads

Some recent reads, in rough order of worthiness from best to worst:

These were good and/or great
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts
Lonely Planet's Phuket Encounter

These were meh/suspect
The Crazed by Ha Jin
Coolidge by Amity Shlaes

This one should be thrown across the room
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Yes, that's correct. Gone Girl is in dead last on the list. I'll get to that in a second. Oh wait, maybe I should say "I'll get to that in literally one second." Which is not true, because it's going to be more than one second, and the expression "I'll get to that in a second" is FIGURATIVE, but apparently the authors and editors in the publishing industry today (see also: The Hunger Games) don't actually have to know what "literally" means but they can use it over and over and over (literally dozens of times!) in these contemporary please-take-me-seriously novels, jarring the reader (but not literally jarring, because how could an author put me in a jar?) and making it so obvious it's the author's voice coming through. Not the literary voice or the writing voice, but the text message voice. That doesn't really work when you tell a story from the points of view of two different characters, but they both just sound like you replying to an email.

Contrast that with The Moonstone, a gem (see what I did there?) from Victorian England, but not your English teacher's Victorian England novel. It has been called "the first detective novel" (would Agatha Christie and the author of The Invention of Murder agree?) but what's so great about it is the narration. There are a few point of view shifts, and each character's distinct attributes are fun, but the snark of the old servant who tells the first half is an unbeatable delight. I love reading classics for numerous reasons, but the fact that they are better edited than most of the crap on front-of-bookstore tables is starting to become a main one. It's bad enough that we live in a memoir- and blog- and print-on-demand-glutted world where everyone who thinks they write can "publish" their words, but when the actual publishers allow sloppy, comma-spliced "voices" to infiltrate the bookstore shelves, it's the beginning of our decline and fall. And that doesn't mean reading can't be fun. I have found most mystery/thriller page turners to be generally well edited over the years, but I guess that is changing. If you want to read a classic that doesn't feel like slogging through a classic, hie thee to The Moonstone.

I read The Moonstone in Phuket, mostly while lazing by the pool and/or by the sea, and while we were there I also read Lonely Planet's Phuket Encounter. Obviously, I had skimmed that before (on our first trip to Phuket) and used it as a reference, but this time I read the whole thing. It just so happens that we also seriously considered moving to Phuket while we were there (I had a job offer, but didn't take it) and I was  enjoying thinking about getting to know the place more deeply as a resident, but still really enjoying it as a traveler, and the Encounter books are good for that: an enriching taste of a place, with where-to-go and what-to-do ideas plus tidbits and a real feel for the spot and its vibes.

I also sat in one of my favorite Phuket coffee shops and finally read Tracy Letts' play August: Osage County. I can't believe I haven't seen a stage production of it (yet) as it has been on my radar since I lived in New York, but it's gloriously funny and dark and I think it's wonderful. I love the wicked dysfunction when it is done so right. Once we returned to Phoenix, we saw the film, and I think Julia Roberts was robbed of a Supporting Actress Oscar.

On to the incredibly average! Our friends whom we met while teaching in Korea and who now live and teach in Shanghai came to Thailand while we were there so we could all hang out in our third country together, and one of them passed along to me Ha Jin's The Crazed, partly because she gave up on it out of boredom. She had heard quite a bit about it, which makes sense since it's about university grad students and professors in the north of China, kind of the exact life my friend is currently living only without the whole lead-up to Tiananmen Square uprising factor. I've still never got around to Waiting despite the many times I touched it at Borders, so this was my first Ha Jin. The story wasn't terrible -- the main character's emotional meandering was a little weird, as was his inability to focus, but it didn't really devolve into unbelievability until the end-- but the writing itself is, for me, filed under "What's all the fuss about?" The main thing about it is that it feels like reading a translation of Chinese language, even though Ha Jin writes in English. This tells you SO MUCH about language, and it is so interesting (for someone like me, who likes words and language) to contemplate the differences between what-we-call-Mandarin and English, and it opens up fascinating questions about translation of literature, our own personal translations of our inner voices, the neuro-linguistic processes of creating art, and so on -- but I really wanted a novel and not a case study. I don't see how people can fawn all over his writing if it all comes across like this, because it doesn't feel natural or like a native speaker at all. Should published writing have to feel like it was written by a native speaker of that language? Which is worse, that Ha Jin sense of prose detachement and not-quite-being-there in the language, or the Gillian Flynn feeling that someone is "literally breathlessly talking to my best friend!!!" as they jabber in a purposely casually unpolished first person?

Coolidge was "meh" for entirely different reasons. Amity Shlaes apparently has writing skills and editors, but her structural and philosophical problems outweigh mere questions of storytelling quality. It's exciting to move into the modern presidents in my Prez Bios project, but I didn't know Shlaes was going to usher us in with this In-Defense-of-Reaganomics screed. She is so eager to prove that if we had listened to Calvin Coolidge's thrifty New England budgeting advice (not that silent Cal was discoursing to many people) we wouldn't have ruined our nation/economy/lives that she makes great leaps in both logic and paragraph construction.

Her book feels like this: "So, Calvin and Grace, now a settled married couple on the political rise, gazed with wonderment at the Boston politics Calvin was dipping his carefully scrubbed toe into, and they set up their Northampton kitchen and ordered new drapes that Calvin cleverly found in a catalog sent from his Amherst classmate who now runs a railroad car and why can't you people see that Wilson ruined everything by allowing Democrats to hang things in the White House windows!?! Those Democrats were signalling to all the world our fear, hiding from the economic truths of cost-cutting and good, solid American materials.  Also, you should pray at night before bed. Let's skip now to Calvin becoming vice-president. Oh wait, you mean I'm actually supposed to connect his life's timeline together in this biography? I'd rather show how his son dying clearly reflects the impending doom of our nation, with Franklin Roosevelt lurking somewhere on the White House lawn, poisoning the Coolidge boy himself. Or was that just a fever dream I had?"

In other words, I learned a lot, including how to read a biography/political interpretation skeptically, a lesson Shlaes teaches rather well.

Last, and very certainly least, we have Gone Girl, the book that took bestseller lists by storm. As one of my clearly brilliant Goodreads friends put it, "It is a book for non-readers who 'read' and like to recommend the book they are 'reading.'" The first half is engaging, if not engrossing, although it's only eighty or so pages before the intern who was in charge of removing "literally" from every other page apparently had to go back to class or checking Instagram or something. Frankly, I related a ton to "Diary Amy," which as I'm sure your book group pointed out gives us so much to ponder about relationships, psychology, how well we know people, blah blah blah. That's all well and good, but then the book starts to veer way off course with its (ideologically) flipped-about second half, and seriously, the less said about the ending, the better. Not because I can't say anything more without majorly spoilering (which is true) but because it's so awful and so doesn't quite work, despite how well Flynn thinks she has stacked the deck against one of her characters (get out! get out! get out! yes, you can get out! and by the way, you suck, too!) .... This book is just a big sigh. Also, a deeply troubling symbol of the state of the U.S. publishing industry: Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me, but don't waste time with silly things like editing, syntax, and vocabulary; what do you think we are, writers or something?

Ugh. I literally wanted to throw the book across the room when I literally  finished reading it, but I was literally reading it on a beach, so I literally had to drop it on the sand instead.

True or false: The word "literally" is used correctly in the previous sentence.

(I wouldn't suggest checking your answer with Gillian Flynn.)

A literary realist, a philosopher, and a crime novelist (walk into a bar?) Or, 2014: So Far

now reading: The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times by Francis Russell

Yes, yes, we're back. 2014 is going to be a year full of reading projects. No, this blog was not updated at any point in the latter half of 2013, a fact I most regret. But let's not dwell on the spilt milk, am I right? Let's pour ourselves a fresh glass - soy, if you please - and get cracking on all the books that are fit to read for 2014, which stretches so nicely ahead of us.

2014 reads so far

The trio with which I've opened the year are three oh-so-very different books.

The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
I've gone on a bit of a Henry James tear of late, not for any real reason other than that I had a collection of his novellas sitting around. I believe I got this packed-to-the-gills edition while I was at USC, but I also believe that I blew off some of my Henry James reading back in the American Lit major day, because I don't recall a thing.  Or is he just that unmemorable? The latter may be all too true. After mildly enjoying a few of the novellas/short stories (espcially "The Aspern Papers") (but that really is a short story, wouldn't you say? I think only Beast and The Turn of the Screw seem long enough to be novellas) I read this Beast last and thought it the most overrated of all. I've been hearing all my life about the homosexual subtext of this thought-provoking masterpiece and I've gotta say, I just didn't see it (neither the homosexuality, nor the provoked thoughts, nor the masterpiece). What on Earth happened between Archer (was that his name? I've already forgotten) and May Bartram?  Oh wait, Marcher. I knew Archer didn't sound right. Well anyway, what was that all about? These two might have the weirdest unconsummated relationship in all of literature, or maybe the weirdest of any relationship. Apparently Mr. James was trying to grapple with/tell us about fate and loneliness. So he has this guy who's convinced something big is going to happen to him and blah blah blah, but how does he get HER to join in with him waiting for this stupid fate? Why can't she wait for her own fate? This book blows me away by how unrealistic it is. Who lives like this? Literary realism, my foot. Anyway, it's over quickly enough, at least.

The Philosophy of Aristotle
Meanwhile, my philosophers project still hasn't really got off the ground, so I've decided to reframe it. I was going to read one philosopher per month each month of 2013, but instead all I did was read a bit about Thales online, then read The Dialogues of Plato (for Socrates) and Republic (for Plato) and then, wouldja look at that, 2013 was over. SO: we'll just say that doing the ancient Greeks was priming the pump, and now that I've done those guys AND Aristotle -- whom, surprise, surprise, I relate to the most (minus the misogyny) -- I will jump into a year of reading 12 philosophers, one per month, as soon as I'm ready to commence that project, which I think will be later this summer. (Because: so many other reading projects to get caught up with in the meantime.) I have to say that reading some of ol' Aristotle's Metaphysics and Logic can be tedious, but Poetics cheered me right up. And really, the guy was a genius. Except for the whole slavery and sexism, ugh, WHY?

212 by Alafair Burke
Aaaaand, a mystery. Mostly because I didn't read my yearly Alafair Burke in 2013 (I didn't set out to make it a yearly tradition, but the last three years living abroad in three different places, I've acquired three of her books on my Kindle for PC (because I have YET to see her paperbacks on sale in any bookstores in Asia; what gives?) and happened to electronically read one in each ESL-teaching-abroad apartment...and though I didn't get to one in China in 2013, everybody knows that even though it was January 2014 it wasn't the new Chinese year yet, so I was still safe. 212 is the third in her Ellie Hatcher series, the spunky Manhattan detective, and there's actually a fourth already out that I will get around to in some future summer. 212 came out a few years ago, I think while I was living in Chicago. As always, reading her books makes me miss living in New York City. This one was all right: interesting banter, really interesting characters (who make terrible choices) (yes, I am judging what some gals choose to do with their lives), and lots of different things going on.  However  SPOILER ALERT!!!   *spoiler spoiler go on to the next paragraph if you don't want a spoiler*  I think that what's-his-name the former cop should have been given more to do --perhaps more banter!--because he was kind of lurking in the background but he was so pivotal, helpful, and involved with different characters in different ways that it made it kind of obvious that he was the bad guy. However to my however, that didn't actually ruin the reading or anything because you still don't quite know how it all fit together. STILL SPOILERING HERE !!!! I also wasn't sure how I felt about the #ambiguousI'mnotambiguous climactic shooting. It was definitely "kind of shady, morality-wise," as Skinny Pete (or was it Badger?) would say. And finally, throughout the novel there are some paragraphs that pop up in which somebody talks too long, uninterrupted.  I often think about this myself, when writing dialogue.  You don't actually write dialogue exactly as people talk, obviously, but you can't cross the line into the place where it's JUST an explanation/rant/showing off of wisdom and no longer resembles real conversation flow. (Are you listening, William Styron in Set This House on Fire?) It might sound like I'm criticizing the book, but I actually just compared Alafair Burke to the great and mighty Styron, so there's that.

Is it interesting that I warned you away from the above paragraph if you don't want spoilers but feel under no obligation to do so, on this blog at least, for Henry James?  Hmmmm.

And now, you ask? Why, I'm reading a prez bio of course.  Stay tuned; in my next post we'll check in with the status of my bio-of-every-prez-to-see-where-we-went-wrong(a project obviously conceived and named during the Dubya "administration").