Geoffrey Brock

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Comments on K.

See complete reviews in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice.

“Calasso’s brash method...is simply to reinscribe, persistently, the essential power of the myths and stories he considers, largely by the act of retelling them in his philosophically muscular prose, superbly translated here by Geoffrey Brock... Rather than surrounding his subject with information, Calasso seems to cause it to glow from within, like fingers cupped around the bulb of a flashlight, so that that which has been taken for granted becomes translucent and revelatory... It’s a measure of Calasso’s accomplishment that his readings feel familiar, as though his erudition were inside us, a pre-existing condition only waiting for diagnosis.” —Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

“Calasso's new study of Kafka, very fluently translated into American English by Geoffrey Brock, [presents] a series of finely expressed, thoughtful—one is on the verge of saying old-fashioned—readings of Kafka's work.... For the most part what strikes one most about these companionable readings is their justice and tact.” —The Independent

“Most people who love Kafka are less interested in the quarrels of the literature departments than in immediate encounters with the life of his disorienting texts. This is one reason why advance notice of Calasso’s K.—elegantly translated from the 2002 Italian edition by Geoffrey Brock—has aroused much interest and hope. The erudite and sophisticated Calasso [is] the author of stunningly brilliant books about Greek and Hindu religious myths, about literary uses of myth, about the premises and the ultimately sinister evolution of European modernity, and about authors who have risked incomprehension and madness for the sake of pressing beyond the arbitrary categories of Western thought. No one could bring more intelligence and cultural range to a fresh encounter with Kafka... Calasso always repays close study, his prose is a marvel, and K. makes for an exhilarating adventure.” —Frederick Crews, New York Review of Books

“Kafka’s fiancée once wrote to him that she had taken his handwriting to a graphologist, who detected ‘artistic interests.’ Kafka wrote back, disdainfully, ‘I don’t have literary interests. I’m made of literature, I’m nothing else and can be nothing else.’ For such a writer, the erudite Italian novelist and publisher Calasso is the ideal critic. Under his patient gaze, the inner connections of Kafka’s writing emerge.” —The New Yorker

“With ingenious elegance, Calasso...offers a refreshingly unconventional study that, despite its unabashedly reductive focus, from start to finish yields astute, nuanced, even revelatory observations that humanize Kafka and, in particular, illuminate the ineffable powers that hold sway over the lives of his two K-protagonists, Josef K. of The Trial, and K. of The Castle. This masterpiece of essayist prose is destined to take its place in the pantheon of Kafka studies.” —Choice

“[An] extraordinarily rich study... Calasso’s remarkable book, which attempts to illuminate Kafka’s fiction by its ‘own light,’ is a reminder that criticism doesn’t have to be strenuously analytical. Sometimes it succeeds by creatively redescribing what it criticises.” —Financial Times

“Calasso’s study is a milestone not just in the ever burgeoning literature about Kafka, but in literature itself... Kafka has had marvelous interpreters in the past, including Walter Benjamin, Canetti and Maurice Blanchot. Without exaggeration, Calasso belongs in this elevated company.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Like Joseph Brodsky's essay on W.H. Auden's 'September 1, 1939,' Calasso's study of Kafka is one of those all too rare performances that give literary criticism a reason to exist.” —The Weekly Standard

“Calasso ... here performs his signature interpretative magic in a deep immersion in the writings of Franz Kafka... Calasso meshes at a seemingly cellular level with Kafka’s language, images, and stories as he extracts and identifies the motifs and perspectives that have made Kafka such a towering presence in our collective imagination... By harmonizing so empathically with his subject, Calasso rekindles appreciation for the unique and indelible power of Kafka’s work as well as its rueful beauty.” —Booklist

“It is perhaps ironic that one of the few critical minds to wrestle Kafka’s work away from the oppressive grip of mythical reduction is an intellectual famous for recognizing the role of myth in literature and history.... K. is a revolutionary entry into Kafka scholarship and should provide those searching for a fresh appraisal of Kafka’s singular universe reason to rejoice.” —The Globe and Mail

“There was, in advance of his work, no Calasso-shaped hole in our literature that anyone other than Calasso himself could have discerned. Yet now that these books exist, they seem to their readers both inevitable and indispensable. Calasso’s new book, K., seems an attempt to follow in the tradition of these works, but with a difference. Here the source material is not ancient mythology, but rather the writings of Franz Kafka.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“K., Calasso’s admirably nimble study of Kafka, is the fourth part of a work in progress. Previous installments charted the slaughter field of history and the Greek river and Indian ocean of myth. Motifs from these books resonate here: Kafka’s world both precedes myth, going back to ‘the origin of the variants’ that are the ‘lifeblood of every mythology,’ and postdates it, being the product of a world (ours) ‘where the unmanifest part—the greater part of what is—was increasingly being ignored or denied.’” —The Village Voice

“Drawing on Kafka’s diary entries and performing dazzling close readings of The Castle, The Trial, and selected short stories, Calasso traces Kafka’s literary lineage from Dickens to Dostoevsky and reveals the many layers of meaning that make up the enigmatic writer’s universe.” —Library Journal

“We were looking forward to a reader of Kafka for the 21st century, the century of fragmentation. And who could be better than Roberto Calasso for this task? After having conjured up the gods of the East and of the West so that our orphan times wouldn’t forget them, he reminds us now of the indispensable existence of Kafka, reporter of the numinous experience.” —Alberto Manguel, El País

“Calasso’s creative energy is active throughout. He claims to present Kafka’s work as ‘illuminated by its own light’ and succeeds in a unique way. Many of his readers will feel compelled to reread Kafka.” —Muriel Spark, The Times Literary Supplement

“Calasso’s interpretation of Kafka is intellectual rather than academic, with nary an ’h’ word (hermeneutic, hegemonic, heuristic) to be found, but the book is also a narrative. Calasso’s technique ... is philosophy made dramatic, which is sort of what Kafka did. Calasso’s relentlessly inquisitive mind is the perfect counterpart to the mind he investigates.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Mr. Calasso leads the reader on a sort of dance through Kafka’s life and work. His short sections, which range from a few sentences to a few pages, pick up an episode, a phrase, a theme, and hold it up to the light of his quick intelligence, before setting it down and moving on.” —New York Sun

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