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INVESTIGATIONS OF A DOG

Name: INVESTIGATIONS OF A DOG
Author: Franz Kafka
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2689-9

AND OTHER CREATURES

by Franz Kafka ; translated by Michael Hofmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 2017

Beguiling, quirky stories perfectly in keeping with the rest of Kafka’s work; often troubling but sometimes delightful.

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A freshly translated collection of posthumously published work by the great master of existential angst and insectoidal transformation.

Kafka did not live long, but he produced an impressive body of work, most of it written in the dark, quiet hours after midnight. Perhaps that accounts for its preternatural gloom, for no one ever cracks a smile in a Kafka story. As translator Hofmann puts it, just right, Kafka “devised for himself a life that was largely disagreeable, inflexible and inescapable, and tried to make it productive.” He succeeded on all counts. Here, a number of odd themes emerge that perhaps connect to Kafka’s penumbral ways: at times, for instance, the narrator holds some sort of night job that puts him in oblique contact with the bureaucrats and bosses who rule the day, as in “New Lamps,” in which an official at company headquarters promises a safety-minded miner better oil lamps by which to work and instructs him to tell his fellow workers, “We won’t rest until we’ve converted your mineshaft into a drawing room.” Other stories illustrate Kafka’s interest in allegories and fables, especially with an Asian coloring, as with “Building the Great Wall of China,” a sketch that speaks of the power of empire to overwhelm the individual, even though the people “are where it ultimately draws its support.” As with the title story, many of Kafka’s stories involve animals. There, the dogs in question revel in a kind of “dogdom” or “dogness” hard won by evolving from their ancestors: “Our generation may be lost,” the narrator tells us, “but it is more innocent than its predecessors.” Just so, a character in another story has “taken a great interest in Elberfeld horses,” that is, horses trained to think like humans—and it’s a short step from there to Gregor Samsa.

Beguiling, quirky stories perfectly in keeping with the rest of Kafka’s work; often troubling but sometimes delightful.

Pub Date: May 23, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2689-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DIARIES OF FRANZ KAFKA
by Franz Kafka ; translated by Ross Benjamin

- BOOK REVIEW
THE UNHAPPINESS OF BEING A SINGLE MAN
by Franz Kafka ; translated by Alexander Starritt

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERIKA
by Franz Kafka & translated by Michael Hoffman

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.