A review by jjupille
Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka

medium-paced

4.5

Ahhh, Kafka. Kafka Kafka Kafka. So Kafka. Little Karl Rossmann is such a little sweetie. One feels so bad for him as the world does what the world does, but he is so plucky, so steadfast, so imperturbible, I absolutely adore him. The sharpest contrast between this one and The Trial and The Castle for me is that the world confronting the protagonist here has less of an internal logic (a logic of its own). In the other two, the world operates by very strict rules, which seem perfectly clear to all of the occupants of all of the other roles while of course being perfectly inscrutable to the protagonist (and the reader). I guess that's still true here, but things are more diffuse. Instead of just the legal or administrative system, Karl is confronted with many different social orders, each of them with its own logic. I suspect the words above don't make much sense. It's just that rather than a narrow organizational context or "institutional logic" many different orders come into play here.