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A review by leonard_gaya
Modern Classics Amerika the Man Who Disappeared by Franz Kafka
5.0
Franz Kafka’s Amerika, initially titled Der Verschollene (The One Who Disappeared), achieved posthumous publication in 1927, edited by Max Brod. Only the opening vignette, “The Stoker” (“Der Heizer”), was published independently as a short piece during Kafka’s lifetime.
The story is about an anti-hero tangled up in an anti-Bildungsroman. From the start, Karl Rossmann, a European immigrant entering the United States through New York Harbor, is utterly lost. To him, San Francisco is on the east coast, and New York is connected to Boston by a mere bridge over the Hudson. From there, Karl is tossed around in increasingly weird and repetitive circumstances: he falls prey to strange women who have a thinly veiled sexual interest in him, struggles with aggressive bosses and convoluted business procedures, befriends other young employees like him, and gets by from day to day, rarely holding a job for long.
In part because of the unfinished and fragmented nature of the text, Amerika feels like an open and unfinished Gestalt, a picaresque novel, a quest without a goal, an episodic Odyssey without any Ithaca or Penelope. On the whole, Karl is a Joseph-like figure: a nomad, a nobody, an exile, a pariah, a Jew, a “Negro” (the name he gives himself in the last fragment of the novel), subjected to a cycle of transient salvations and humiliating rejections, pushing him toward society’s outskirts. Ultimately, the tale stops for reasons known only to its author, leaving us with a question: could Karl find genuine freedom or descend into an abyss of degradation?
Contrary to Kafka’s traditionally claustrophobic settings, this novel is unusually vibrant, tightly composed, and filled with direct speech and weird descriptions of gestures. It was penned at the peak of immigration from Eastern Europe and layered with the nuances of the contemporary world of the early 20th century. And despite its fragmentary structure, it remains a testament to Kafka’s exceptional storytelling skills and his ability to challenge readers with an intricately woven narrative that effortlessly merges reality and metaphor.
Many years later, [a:Philip Roth|463|Philip Roth|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1399886959p2/463.jpg] would imagine how an older Kafka, having survived tuberculosis and escaping Nazi Germany, could have followed the steps of his creation: “just a Jew lucky enough to have escaped with his life, in his possession a suitcase containing some clothes, some family photos, some Prague mementos, and the manuscripts, still unpublished and in pieces, of Amerika, The Trial, The Castle, and (stranger things happen) three more fragmented novels, no less remarkable than the bizarre masterworks that he keeps to himself out of oedipal timidity, perfectionist madness, and insatiable longings for solitude and spiritual purity.” (From Roth’s essay “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka.”)
The story is about an anti-hero tangled up in an anti-Bildungsroman. From the start, Karl Rossmann, a European immigrant entering the United States through New York Harbor, is utterly lost. To him, San Francisco is on the east coast, and New York is connected to Boston by a mere bridge over the Hudson. From there, Karl is tossed around in increasingly weird and repetitive circumstances: he falls prey to strange women who have a thinly veiled sexual interest in him, struggles with aggressive bosses and convoluted business procedures, befriends other young employees like him, and gets by from day to day, rarely holding a job for long.
In part because of the unfinished and fragmented nature of the text, Amerika feels like an open and unfinished Gestalt, a picaresque novel, a quest without a goal, an episodic Odyssey without any Ithaca or Penelope. On the whole, Karl is a Joseph-like figure: a nomad, a nobody, an exile, a pariah, a Jew, a “Negro” (the name he gives himself in the last fragment of the novel), subjected to a cycle of transient salvations and humiliating rejections, pushing him toward society’s outskirts. Ultimately, the tale stops for reasons known only to its author, leaving us with a question: could Karl find genuine freedom or descend into an abyss of degradation?
Contrary to Kafka’s traditionally claustrophobic settings, this novel is unusually vibrant, tightly composed, and filled with direct speech and weird descriptions of gestures. It was penned at the peak of immigration from Eastern Europe and layered with the nuances of the contemporary world of the early 20th century. And despite its fragmentary structure, it remains a testament to Kafka’s exceptional storytelling skills and his ability to challenge readers with an intricately woven narrative that effortlessly merges reality and metaphor.
Many years later, [a:Philip Roth|463|Philip Roth|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1399886959p2/463.jpg] would imagine how an older Kafka, having survived tuberculosis and escaping Nazi Germany, could have followed the steps of his creation: “just a Jew lucky enough to have escaped with his life, in his possession a suitcase containing some clothes, some family photos, some Prague mementos, and the manuscripts, still unpublished and in pieces, of Amerika, The Trial, The Castle, and (stranger things happen) three more fragmented novels, no less remarkable than the bizarre masterworks that he keeps to himself out of oedipal timidity, perfectionist madness, and insatiable longings for solitude and spiritual purity.” (From Roth’s essay “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka.”)