Amerika

Like much of Kafka's other fiction, this novel has the feel of a vivid dream. On the first page, we learn that the Statue of Liberty holds a sword over New York Harbor. In the first chapter, our hapless young protagonist meets his uncle by chance for the first time, and finds out that he is a respected and wealthy senator. Karl Rossman lives his first months in America in the lap of luxury, and then is abruptly kicked out onto the street. For the entire novel, he's tormented, abused, and occasionally comforted by a shifting cast of goons, louts, and insane people known as Americans. Kafka has an unerring sense of the anxieties that constant exposure to strangers entails. People say one thing and then do another, or they invent justifications for actions which seem totally unconnected. Also he seems to be afraid of women. The imagery, especially descriptions of the street scenes or hotels, are reminiscent of a musical film, everything in perpetual motion, objects always uncountable, vignettes always generalized and repeated, like dancers in a Busby Berkeley number. Kafka wrote elsewhere that he may have been trying to write a Charles Dickens novel, and the arc of Karl Rossman's adventures, from steerage to mansion, then gutter to workhouse, certainly takes the same shape as Dickens. There are a few references to serious political questions, but when Politics itself makes an appearance, it's as another spectacle, a parade with a carnival barker giving a speech that no one can hear over the cheering. The only real social-satirical jabs are at the American emphasis on rugged independence to the point of madness.

This was Kafka's first novel, which he never finished, and was published posthumously. My edition neglected to mention it was unfinished on the back cover (it may say so in the preface, which I skipped). As I neared the end, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, in which seemingly everyone is being hired to act in a theater in precisely the roles they were already in, the novel ends abruptly (as if awaking from a dream), on an image of a river seen from a train that echoes the first chapter on the ship. Max Brod, Kafka's friend and biographer, comes onstage and explains the misunderstanding in an afterword. Really funny way to end a funny book, but I do wonder if Franz had any hope of writing in the missing material before he died.