I found this book via Elif Batuman. She it was who brought the Kafka death centenary to my attention in the first place. As she noted, June this year brought with it a slew of Kafka-themed everything: Books, conferences, exhibitions, video games, you name it.

And this collection of 10 stories, published in 2024, was one such contribution.


Andy Warhol's Kafka. The photos are from an exhibition entitled Kafka: Making of an Icon, Oxford, 2024

I listened to the audio-version. The stories are narrated by Jessica Hayles, Minhee Yeo, Penelope Rawlins, and Matt Reeves, and they all do a fine job. Some of the pieces don't entirely lend themselves to an audio presentation, however. (I'm particularly thinking of the text-message format of Helen Oyeyemi's Hygiene. I did wonder whether Yiyun Li's Apostrophe's Dream would come across effectively, given that it's a play with several characters, rendered by two narrators, but that one worked surprisingly well.)

The book title is taken from the aphorisms Kafka wrote in Zurau, when he was convalescing in 1917 after his tuberculosis diagnosis. No. 16 is constituted by the exact text of the title: "A cage went in search of a bird."

There's an excellent introduction by Becca Rothfeld, who leads us through Kafka's inverted world. Here, guilt precedes sin. The cage, therefore, precedes the bird. In fact, the cage invents the bird, because the shackles come first. Your imprisonment predates you; it was always waiting for you; in effect it creates you, so that birds become secondary to their cages.

Yet, Rothfeld tells us, the Zurau period was a relatively happy one. ("I want to live here always," said Kafka.) But he also read Kierkegaard here. His notebooks are more religious than usual. He observes that a silent God is worse than a wrathful God.

Cages crop up in the most innocuous places. And, as Kafka knew all too well, it's often our homes that entrap us. So homes feature in many of the stories.


This is his little room...

In Ali Smith's Art Hotel, we encounter a somewhat mysterious world of cameras, and artificial-looking people, and "surgeon-removers" working with "life serum". This is all rather dark and inaccessible. Equally dark but very easy to imagine, on the other hand, is the red line that keeps circumscribing our lead family. First, it appears around their house (devoid of Mum for the moment because she seems to be working her sick sister's job so that she doesn't lose it). The family leave the red-encircled house, and get back on board the camper van they have used to visit Mum: "Why are we leaving?" "It's time to." "Are we travellers now?" "Yes."

They park at a Tesco's. Another red line appears, around the van this time. And it won't work any more, and is towed away. So now they're backpacking. It's a terrifying scenario, as they're cut off from more and more of their lives. We leave them, making their way on foot to the port. One of the sisters worries that someone will paint a red line around THEM, right over their shoes...

Keith Ridgway's The Landlord is also about a place to live. In all honesty, I'm not totally sure what happens here, but it certainly adds up to something threatening. There's the tenant, in his cramped, confined situation, living a small, restricted life. Then there's the landlord, apparently uncaring, but burdened by his dying wife. The tenant seems trapped in the landlord's perception of him. We see him visiting the landlord's house. There's a knife. An axe. A police team in pursuit. What happened exactly? The tenant says: "I am not myself entirely. How could I be? I am something else. I am an allocated life. Here you are. Live here."

Elif Batuman's The Board deals with the problem of finding somewhere to live in the first place. Our home-seeking protagonist is admitted into a bizarre dwelling, whose administrators have developed some equally bizarre rules and regulations with which to vet prospective buyers. At the end, we leave the narrator literally suspended at the bottom of a ladder, wondering what to do next... It possibly comes as no surprise that this story was inspired by Batuman's real-life experience of trying to buy a co-op apartment in New York, which does sound like a truly surreal business...

Batuman's story (there's a nice analysis on the same page) is one of the most plausibly Kafka-like contributions of the collection. She describes a situation that is fundamentally weird, but the protagonist carries on behaving as though all is normal. Various objects suddenly manifest themselves as other objects. And it's very funny, with its formal language contrasting with the absurdity of the situation it's describing.

The subtitle of the collection is "Ten Kafkaesque Stories". And there are a couple of others that I would put in the "highly Kafkaesque" category.

One is Leone Ross's Headache. This was terribly reminiscent of the incomprehensible vortex you often get drawn into when dealing with certain health services... A woman is referred to a specialist because she suffers from headaches. Before she gets to see the specialist, the headaches stop. But she can't extract herself from the conveyor belt she is now on. No-one listens properly. Everyone follows the script, and refuses to actually engage in communication. So she's stuck first in the MRI machine, and then in a hermetically sealed room. No-one can tell her what -- if anything -- she is suffering from, or when she can expect to leave the hospital. This was a very scary story, giving the reader a palpable sense of being trapped and powerless.

Charlie Kaufman's This Fact Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing (the title is another Kafka quote) is also appropriately mind-bending. We have a writer called I. He's at a public reading to promote his latest book, but the Q&A session finds him more and more out of his depth and out of control. The interviewer asks him about a particular passage in the book, but he doesn't recognize it, and later finds it comes directly from Kafka. Again, this is an angst-engendering story, as our author loses his grip on his identity, and fact and fiction start to blur.


One conception of The Castle

***

Many of the stories in the book were good, but not (to me) authentically "Kafkaesque".

Return to the Museum by Joshua Cohen is one such. It's a great story; it's very funny; and the covid period -- from which we're just emerging in this tale -- definitely had its Kafkaesque elements. The confusion; the isolation; the conspiracy theories... Our protagonist, a Neanderthal in a museum that's been closed for ages because of the pandemic, witnesses a "die-in" (a protest by visitors worried about extinction). It's beautifully observed. Just not quite Kafka-like...

A couple of other stories also have a covid background. In The Hurt, by Tommy Orange, for example, people suddenly experience terrible bouts of psychological pain. Because this agony sometimes drives sufferers to suicide, handcuffs are made available as a public service, with the result that people can emerge from this awful experience to find themselves shackled to a bench in a park... I guess you could argue that the Kafkaesque element is existential pain.

Then there's Hygiene, by Helen Oyeyemi, where a guy finds his relationship with his girlfriend hijacked by some hectoring Other who is very into cleanliness and Korean bathhouses (there is apparently a thing called Jjimjilbang nomadism). This story seems a reflection on the obsessiveness that formed the background to our covid-era lives. And there's certainly a Kafka-reminiscent breakdown of communication.

As I listened, however, I was surprised to find myself slightly turned off by the covid references. Maybe it's too soon afterwards. Or maybe it already seems so much like an unreal nightmare that we can't relate to stories about it.



**

In the "totally brilliant but not exactly Kafkaesque" category, I'd put God's Doorbell, by Naomi Alderman. This was one of my favourites, and definitely makes me want to seek out more of this author's work (it was her book that inspired Sebastian Lelio's Disobedience). God's Doorbell is a beautifully twisty take on the Babel story, with everything reversed. We're in a future era, having survived some bad wars and a pandemic. Humans are now all connected, and think as one (aided by the Instatranslate). Their lives are ruled, and their welfare provided for, by the Machines. Then the Machines decide to build a tower, and start to encounter God (or the gods). The humans can't bear to let that happen: "Some of us didn't like it..." The humans feel that whatever is up there might like the Machines better than it likes them. So they scramble the Machines, which no longer understand each other, no longer work as efficiently, and start to come into conflict. They're no longer able to get ideas above their station: "It's better that way."

Also brilliantly inventive but not really Kafkaesque was Yiyun Li's Apostrophe's Dream. Here, all the punctuation marks squabble over finding the collective noun that will best band them all together. Very funny.

All the stories were interesting, and all definitely comment on the absurdity of our modern lives. I thought, though, that this comment by Isabelle Stuart was very perceptive: "One quality of Kafka’s work consistently eludes these pieces. [Kafka's] stories endure because of their untimeliness; both before their time, anticipating everything from Soviet bureaucracy to the Covid-19 pandemic, but also out of time, extracting the universal from the specific. Sometimes these stories give a taste of that enigmatic compound... More often, they snag on details: Bosch appliances, a Tesco car park, hospital waiting lists. Perhaps that is where this collection’s tribute to Kafka really lies. Readers will turn back to the original stories with a sense of how strongly they still stand alone. One hundred years on, it is still Kafka’s world we are living in."