K.

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka: an utterly original, fascinating interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka that is simultaneously an unprecedented exploration into the mystery of Kafka himself.

What are Kafka’s stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? Countless answers have been offered, but the question still arouses feelings of acute uncertainty. Many solutions have been proposed, but the essential mystery remains intact.  In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. To that end, with his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into a puzzling question: why are K. and Josef K.–the protagonists of The Castle and The Trial–so radically different from any other characters in the history of the novel? So, in the end, the most basic question along the way is: Who is K.?

The culmination of the author’s lifelong fascination with Kafka, K. is a book of significant literary importance, the fourth part in a work in progress of which the previous volumes are The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and Ka.

"Calasso's study is a milestone not just in the ever burgeoning literature about Kafka, but in literature itself. This remarkably elegant essay gains its intellectual authority from Calasso's tone: he's amazingly well read, without being a factotum of any particular discipline. Elias Canetti remarked that Kafka was, as a writer 'so utterly himself' that the critic 'must, even at the risk of seeming slavish, adhere as closely as possible to his [Kafka's] own statements.' Calasso follows this advice. Among the insights into The Castle that make the first four chapters a must for interested readers of that work is the way in which Calasso sees K. as a continuation of Josef K, the hero of Kafka's earlier The Trial. 'The Castle,' Calasso claims, 'is Josef K's bardo' ('the intermediate state' in the Tibetan Book of the Dead). Calasso is so intimate with the texts, including the diaries, short stories and The Trial, that his voice sometimes emerges uncannily from the texts themselves, as though he were one of those mysterious exegetes that Kafka loved to put in his stories. Particularly astute is Calasso's observation that the image of the assimilated Jew runs through the novels like a great latent anxiety dream, leading outward, to Kafka's prophetic sense of the insecurity of the Jews in Central Europe, and inward, to the household of Kafka's father. Kafka has had marvelous interpreters in the past, including Walter Benjamin, Canetti and Maurice Blanchot. Without exaggeration, Calasso (Literature and the Gods) belongs in this elevated company." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Roberto Calasso is also the author of The Forty-Nine Steps and Literature and the Gods. He lives in Milan and is the publisher of Adelphi.