Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
by Franz Kafka
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Book Summary Information
Author: Franz KafkaTranslator: Michael Hofmann
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2004-05
ISBN: 0811215695
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Book Reviews of Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
Book Review: ignore the haters--this book is great!
Summary: 5 Stars
this book is a delight from beginning to end. it's unfinished, but so are all of kafka's novels (and many of his stories). He was a divinely inspired dilettante, not a professional writer; his stuff should be read the way one reads chaotic, fragmented ancient texts like gilgamesh or the book of genesis, as opposed to polished, narratively coherent modern fiction.
Amerika is by far kafka's most cheerful book. it has his usual themes of elusive acceptance alternating with alienation, but it's quite silly and charming. it's full of absurd situations and odd details, such as perpetual strikers picketing in the streets, an impossibly complicated mechanical desk and a pair of straight-out-of-central-casting crooks. it's a wild european projection of what america was about at the dawn of the modern age.
Summary of Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
Michael Hofmann's superb new translation of Franz Kafka's epic work. Franz Kafka's Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) at last has the translator it deserves. Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation.Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, "necessarily endless." Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, "a poor boy of seventeen," has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure, and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma.
In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated - including the book's original "ending."
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