Kafka again, and me.
Quite early in life - I was born in 1944 - I got interested in reading books. I
soon developed a taste for good novels like those writ by Jane Austen, Joseph
Conrad, Virginia Woolf and Melville, just to mention a few.
Since I am a Swede and I was brought up in Sweden and I read all the classics of my own country, like the masterpieces of Strindberg and Almqvist, both of them giants when it comes to dense, thrilling, prose in Swedish.
I later discovered Kafka, and with him the vast literature of ambiguity and of romantic irony. It was around 1968 when I already had studied History of Arts, Philosophy and General Literature in Gothenburg.
Those days I was living in a small, worn flat in the centre of this town and my eyes had in an antiquarian´s fallen upon a small used volume by Kafka in German, the novel Amerika. I was already familiar with The Metamorphosis, in Swedish translation. I then started out with my small German pocket version of Amerika, and I was richly rewarded, immediately struck by the immense and very odd beauty of the first sentences in this book, in by its original tone, in the language it was written in. I read the whole book through, in one single breath, without even once consulting any lexicon. I guess I must have missed a detail or two, since my German was far from exquisite. I was however from this moment on hooked up by Kafka. I started reading everything else he had written, and in the University I then wrote several small essays and subject papers on Kafka. It was now soon one major problem that became central to me. How did Kafka do? How could he acquire this formidable effect, the Kafkaesque, an effect that scarcely ever anybody, but some of the German Romantics of the early 19th century, had managed to create anything even remotely similar to?
My research concerning this problem began as early as in 1972. The answer to my question did not show rapidly. And I was busy doing other things. One day in 2001, though, late in the evening, I, all of a sudden, out of the blue, got the main idea for a solution. I started to investigate this idea further, and now began an intense study of the Kafka literature in order to find out whether I was alone in my discovery, or not.
I found out that I was.
Now I was ready for my second challenge. How could I explain my foundings and views in the best possible manner? Since my understanding of the subject matter was broad, and a result of many impulses, and sincethis very understanding came close to the understanding of various other human phenomena, I decided to let my work reflect these vast fields in order to make it possible for my reader to draw his or her own conclusions, many of which I have decided not to actually draw myself, but which all are there in their sheer implicitness. The result is: Kafka and the kafkaesque.
Since I am a Swede and I was brought up in Sweden and I read all the classics of my own country, like the masterpieces of Strindberg and Almqvist, both of them giants when it comes to dense, thrilling, prose in Swedish.
I later discovered Kafka, and with him the vast literature of ambiguity and of romantic irony. It was around 1968 when I already had studied History of Arts, Philosophy and General Literature in Gothenburg.
Those days I was living in a small, worn flat in the centre of this town and my eyes had in an antiquarian´s fallen upon a small used volume by Kafka in German, the novel Amerika. I was already familiar with The Metamorphosis, in Swedish translation. I then started out with my small German pocket version of Amerika, and I was richly rewarded, immediately struck by the immense and very odd beauty of the first sentences in this book, in by its original tone, in the language it was written in. I read the whole book through, in one single breath, without even once consulting any lexicon. I guess I must have missed a detail or two, since my German was far from exquisite. I was however from this moment on hooked up by Kafka. I started reading everything else he had written, and in the University I then wrote several small essays and subject papers on Kafka. It was now soon one major problem that became central to me. How did Kafka do? How could he acquire this formidable effect, the Kafkaesque, an effect that scarcely ever anybody, but some of the German Romantics of the early 19th century, had managed to create anything even remotely similar to?
My research concerning this problem began as early as in 1972. The answer to my question did not show rapidly. And I was busy doing other things. One day in 2001, though, late in the evening, I, all of a sudden, out of the blue, got the main idea for a solution. I started to investigate this idea further, and now began an intense study of the Kafka literature in order to find out whether I was alone in my discovery, or not.
I found out that I was.
Now I was ready for my second challenge. How could I explain my foundings and views in the best possible manner? Since my understanding of the subject matter was broad, and a result of many impulses, and sincethis very understanding came close to the understanding of various other human phenomena, I decided to let my work reflect these vast fields in order to make it possible for my reader to draw his or her own conclusions, many of which I have decided not to actually draw myself, but which all are there in their sheer implicitness. The result is: Kafka and the kafkaesque.
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