Der Verschollene - BookWyrm.World

426 pages

German language

Published Jan. 6, 1983 by S. Fischer.

ISBN:: 978-3-10-038127-9

"Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he liked to call his ''American novel," but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912. Kafka began writing the novel that fall and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914, but it wasn't until 1927, three years after his death, that Amerika - the title that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod gave his edited version of the unfinished manuscript - was published in Germany by Kurt Wolff Verlag. An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published in Great Britain in 1932 and in the United States in 1946." "Over the last thirty years, an international team of Kafka …

"Franz Kafka's diaries and letters suggest that his fascination with America grew out of a desire to break away from his native Prague, even if only in his imagination. Kafka died before he could finish what he liked to call his ''American novel," but he clearly entitled it Der Verschollene ("The Missing Person") in a letter to his fiancee, Felice Bauer, in 1912. Kafka began writing the novel that fall and wrote the last completed chapter in 1914, but it wasn't until 1927, three years after his death, that Amerika - the title that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod gave his edited version of the unfinished manuscript - was published in Germany by Kurt Wolff Verlag. An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published in Great Britain in 1932 and in the United States in 1946." "Over the last thirty years, an international team of Kafka scholars has been working on German-language critical editions of all of Kafka's writings, going back to the original manuscripts and notes, correcting transcription errors, and removing Brod's editorial and stylistic interventions to create texts that are as close as possible to the way the author left them." "With the same expert balance of precision and nuance that marked his award-winning translation of The Castle, Mark Harman now restores the humor and particularity of language in his translation of the critical edition of Der Verschollene. Here is the story of young Karl Rossmann, who, following an incident involving a housemaid, is banished by his parents to America. With unquenchable optimism and in the company of two comic-sinister companions, he throws himself into misadventure after misadventure, eventually heading toward Oklahoma, where a career in the theater beckons. Though we can never know how Kafka planned to end the novel, Harman's superb translation allows us to appreciate, as closely as possible, what Kafka did commit to the page."--Jacket.

46 editions

Joe (Literate) reviewed Amerika by Franz Kafka

Karl's Bizarre Adventure

4 stars

Like much of Kafka's other fiction, this novel has the feel of a vivid dream. On the first page, we learn that the Statue of Liberty holds a sword over New York Harbor. In the first chapter, our hapless young protagonist meets his uncle by chance for the first time, and finds out that he is a respected and wealthy senator. Karl Rossman lives his first months in America in the lap of luxury, and then is abruptly kicked out onto the street. For the entire novel, he's tormented, abused, and occasionally comforted by a shifting cast of goons, louts, and insane people known as Americans. Kafka has an unerring sense of the anxieties that constant exposure to strangers entails. People say one thing and then do another, or they invent justifications for actions which seem totally unconnected. Also he seems to be afraid of women. The imagery, especially descriptions …

Like much of Kafka's other fiction, this novel has the feel of a vivid dream. On the first page, we learn that the Statue of Liberty holds a sword over New York Harbor. In the first chapter, our hapless young protagonist meets his uncle by chance for the first time, and finds out that he is a respected and wealthy senator. Karl Rossman lives his first months in America in the lap of luxury, and then is abruptly kicked out onto the street. For the entire novel, he's tormented, abused, and occasionally comforted by a shifting cast of goons, louts, and insane people known as Americans. Kafka has an unerring sense of the anxieties that constant exposure to strangers entails. People say one thing and then do another, or they invent justifications for actions which seem totally unconnected. Also he seems to be afraid of women. The imagery, especially descriptions of the street scenes or hotels, are reminiscent of a musical film, everything in perpetual motion, objects always uncountable, vignettes always generalized and repeated, like dancers in a Busby Berkeley number. Kafka wrote elsewhere that he may have been trying to write a Charles Dickens novel, and the arc of Karl Rossman's adventures, from steerage to mansion, then gutter to workhouse, certainly takes the same shape as Dickens. There are a few references to serious political questions, but when Politics itself makes an appearance, it's as another spectacle, a parade with a carnival barker giving a speech that no one can hear over the cheering. The only real social-satirical jabs are at the American emphasis on rugged independence to the point of madness.

This was Kafka's first novel, which he never finished, and was published posthumously. My edition neglected to mention it was unfinished on the back cover (it may say so in the preface, which I skipped). As I neared the end, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, in which seemingly everyone is being hired to act in a theater in precisely the roles they were already in, the novel ends abruptly (as if awaking from a dream), on an image of a river seen from a train that echoes the first chapter on the ship. Max Brod, Kafka's friend and biographer, comes onstage and explains the misunderstanding in an afterword. Really funny way to end a funny book, but I do wonder if Franz had any hope of writing in the missing material before he died.