Kafka Americana

#69
Title: Kafka AmericanaAuthors: Jonathan Lethem & Carter Scholz
Publisher: Norton
Year: 2001
Genre: Short stories
100 pages

This slender collection of collaborative and individual co-optations of Kafka forms a nice set. Stories range from Lethem's "The Notebooks of Bob K," which tires me in a way that reminds me that I once had boundless enthusiasm for postmodern experiments, to the co-written "Receding Horizon." Though still studded with post-modern asides that don't particularly enhance the narrative, this piece made me gasp aloud through its brilliant identification of, and play with, similarities between Kafka's "The Judgment" and Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. Yes, really. In its attention to the bizarre distortions of perception and story incumbent upon even the most stolid translation from literature to film, "Receding Horizon" also evokes Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet(Isherwood's fictionalized account of working on the script for the film Little Friend). Read this collection, then refresh yourself with Barthelme's more accessible stories in the delicious Sixty Stories.