Quote:
Originally Posted by fjea
I registered just for this, and I have a feeling it's stating the obvious but, what about Kafka?
I don't read much fiction, but I truly enjoyed The Trial and Amerika. I have The Castle too, but as of yet not got round to reading it. His style may be an acquired taste, but I find it very stimulating. Some translations are better than others, though which exactly I don't recall.
Coincidentally was recently in Prague, took a photo of his street (and building)!
Hope this might be helpful  |
Love Kafka. And
The Trial (probably the translation by Breon Mitchell) is one of the greatest works of modern fiction, right up there with James Joyce's Ulysses and Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Kafka's style is just as strange and compelling as the stories he tells. He describes weird and completely crazy situations (A man wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug, a man is on trial for a crime the nature of which is completely unknown, a prisoner is going to be executed by a machine that carves a list of the man's crimes onto his flesh, etc.) with such casual and matter-of-fact sentences. In many ways, I think Kafka's work formed the basis of the "magic realism" movement that became the hallmark of author's like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, among others.