This is especially pronounced in the short stories. If, as is sometimes said, Kafka’s voice epitomises the era in which he lived, he doesn’t approach the historic circumstances of that age head-on, but rather through a variety of oblique and often surreal removal strategies. Kafka doesn’t trade in quotable turns of phrase but in granitic paragraphs, an incremental build-up of subtly dissonant sentences whose overall effect is not so much to impress us as make us feel unsettled and slightly seasick. Like Beckett after him, if Kafka makes it new it is primarily by subtraction rather than addition, stripping his prose of most of the stylistic adornments that classical aesthetics have taught us to admire. There are none of the extended dialectical workouts we find in the more overtly cerebral modernists, and there’s little in the way of technical trickery. The face-melting prose of Nabokov or Henry James the allusive density of Joyce or Proust the psychological subtlety of Woolf or Eliot the social sweep of Dickens or Tolstoy the flashy metaphysics of Musil or Mann.īut it is more problematic to find a relevant subsection under Great in which to file Kafka. What is it that makes Kafka’s fiction so important? There are more readily identifiable features in other major modern authors that make it more straightforward – perhaps due to a sensibility their work has helped shape – to account for the esteem in which they are held. (Franz Kafka – giant of Modernist literature and pioneering Shoreditch twat)

The castle kafka