Karl Rossmann is sixteen when his family sends him to the United States after a servant girl has a child by him. He arrives in New York, a land of skyscrapers, where an uncle, a senator, takes him in, and then expels him for a minor disobedience. He drifts through jobs and encounters, ending in the mysterious Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. Kafka never finished the novel, and he never visited America, so the country is rendered as a strange, mechanised dream.
It is the lightest and most comic of Kafka's three novels, good for readers who want his sense of arbitrary authority without the gloom. It also stands as an early portrait of the immigrant as an outsider.
Deep, open-ended and thought-provoking; a moderate read.
Best for readers like The Literary Connoisseur. Which reader are you?
- Published
- 1994
- Publisher
- Fischer
- ISBN
- 9783596124428
- Language
- DE
