Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Doubleday Anchor Books (Doubleday & Company, Inc.)
Pages
301
Description
Kafka's first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures. Although Kafka never visited America, images of its vast landscape, dangers, and opportunities inspired this saga of the "golden land"
Collection
Language
Original language
German
Original publication date
1927
Physical description
301 p.; 7.2 inches
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User reviews
LibraryThing member casspurp
Taken for what it is, an unfinished novel, Amerika is a well-written critique of the American Dream and experience. To call this work stereotypical in any way is to forget when it was written and its literary point. This novel was written decades before the immigrant story was mass-marketed as
There is a sense of feeling lost and alone throughout most of the novel which both reflects the writer himself and speaks to the experience of leaving one's home for a strange land. Certain choices made by Karl are to gain friendship or secure a situation where he will no longer be alone, yet he often finds himself worse off than before. This plays into Kafka's sense of guilt and duty as, no matter how cruel and misleading people are to him, Karl always feels as if he is the one who has done wrong. This helps show a major contrast between people like Karl who have recently arrived and people such as Robinson and Delamarche who have been in America for quite some time. This new country makes men into something entirely different than they would be in their homelands and I think Kafka might have discovered this as he continued the story, since Karl loses his blind optimism, such as the belief held by Kafka that Americans are constantly smiling and happy, and develops an ability to transcend his guilt to better his situation towards the end of the novel.
Are there fantastical elements to Amerika? Yes, but that is to be expected with Kafka and one would be mistaken to discredit this novel because certain situations might appear a little hard to believe. The ending is indeed optimistic so far as Kafka goes, but I think that is what makes this a poignant, engaging story. I would almost say this might be the ending he would have chosen had he been able to finish the novel because readers are left with nothing but an open landscape and a hopeful idea of what's to come.
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paperback and Hollywood film, so if you're believing nothing here is "new," it might just be you're forgetting many of these elements come from books like Amerika and you're missing the point. Kafka is neither extolling America, its capitalistic practises and division of social classes, or explicitly condemning them. He is presenting readers with the story of this young man and how America transforms him ideologically and otherwise. This is not a novel about how wondrous is America or how easy life becomes for European emigrants once they step off the boat. It's amusing that Kafka had never visited the country, yet managed to write a tale which details the life of an immigrant so well. Karl is someone with whom readers are able to identify no matter their backgrounds or positions in life. The characters are dynamic and whether you love or hate them, you'll find your fingers flipping through pages long after you've decided to take a break.There is a sense of feeling lost and alone throughout most of the novel which both reflects the writer himself and speaks to the experience of leaving one's home for a strange land. Certain choices made by Karl are to gain friendship or secure a situation where he will no longer be alone, yet he often finds himself worse off than before. This plays into Kafka's sense of guilt and duty as, no matter how cruel and misleading people are to him, Karl always feels as if he is the one who has done wrong. This helps show a major contrast between people like Karl who have recently arrived and people such as Robinson and Delamarche who have been in America for quite some time. This new country makes men into something entirely different than they would be in their homelands and I think Kafka might have discovered this as he continued the story, since Karl loses his blind optimism, such as the belief held by Kafka that Americans are constantly smiling and happy, and develops an ability to transcend his guilt to better his situation towards the end of the novel.
Are there fantastical elements to Amerika? Yes, but that is to be expected with Kafka and one would be mistaken to discredit this novel because certain situations might appear a little hard to believe. The ending is indeed optimistic so far as Kafka goes, but I think that is what makes this a poignant, engaging story. I would almost say this might be the ending he would have chosen had he been able to finish the novel because readers are left with nothing but an open landscape and a hopeful idea of what's to come.
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LibraryThing member jklavanian
Not Kafka's best work
LibraryThing member mbmackay
Less weird than The Trial - but still Kafka! Ends with what must be the clunkiest metaphor in literature.
Read in Samoa June 2003
Read in Samoa June 2003
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
Franz Kafka broke off writing his first novel, Amerika, on January 24, 1913. Though one of the most famous stay-at-homes in literature, Kafka read widely including travel books. His absurdist novel Amerika begins with young Karl viewing the Statue of Liberty and feeling "the free winds of heaven”
The United States that Kafka depicts is more based upon myth than any real experience of the place. Certain odd details reveal one Continental impression of this land at a time when so many Eastern Europeans were emigrating. Drawing on a host of sources—including Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and the poetry of Walt Whitman—and calling to the reader’s mind an even more formidable array of literary analogues—from William Shakespeare’s one play set in the Americas, The Tempest, to Henry James’s international novels, Kafka conjures an America more fabulous than factual. Appropriately enough, in Kafka’s America much of the action takes place in the deepest night, at the deepest levels of the subconscious and of the spirit.
Kafka seemed to intuit that being someone, or anyone, in the geographical vastness of America was not altogether different from the problem of being someone in the bureaucratic vastness of German-dominated Prague. Establishing an identity was, moreover, a problem compounded by the question of home, a question that was important both to the immigrant and to the Czech. “I want above all to get home,” Karl points out early in the novel. By “home,” he literally means the house of his Uncle Jacob but, figuratively, he is referring to that dream of a familiar place where he will feel secure, understood, accepted: the garden from which Karl, like Adam, has been banished. Because of his original sin, he has been condemned to wander the earth in search not only of a home, or refuge, but of justice and mercy as well. As he comes to realize, however momentarily, “It’s impossible to defend oneself where there is no good will.” What this sudden revelation suggests is that the absence of mercy, whether human or divine, makes justice impossible. Just as important, this situation renders all Karl’s efforts not only existentially futile but—and this is Kafka’s genius—comically absurd as well. The chance encounters that characterize the novel, the arbitrary exercise of authority by those who are in power (parents, uncles, head porters, and the like),the uncertain rules and regulations, and the various characters’—especially Karl’s—precarious status constitute Kafka’s fictional world.
That the Statue of Liberty holds aloft a sword instead of a torch and that a bridge connects New York City and Boston unsettle the reading by placing an essentially realist novel close to the realm of fantasy. Much of that fantasy is dark and disturbing, but by the end — first editor Max Brod says Kafka quit while on his intended last chapter — Karl has reached the wide open West, where he seems reborn as a bit actor in “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” Kafka would go on to write better and more labyrinthine tales, but his first novel is an intriguing vision of America.
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on his face. Within moments he is lost in the maze of the multiple levels of the ship looking for an umbrella he left behind. While this reminded me of Alice's initial fall into the rabbit hole it also alerted me that I was in a Kafka novel, albeit a slightly different type than I had read before. The United States that Kafka depicts is more based upon myth than any real experience of the place. Certain odd details reveal one Continental impression of this land at a time when so many Eastern Europeans were emigrating. Drawing on a host of sources—including Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and the poetry of Walt Whitman—and calling to the reader’s mind an even more formidable array of literary analogues—from William Shakespeare’s one play set in the Americas, The Tempest, to Henry James’s international novels, Kafka conjures an America more fabulous than factual. Appropriately enough, in Kafka’s America much of the action takes place in the deepest night, at the deepest levels of the subconscious and of the spirit.
Kafka seemed to intuit that being someone, or anyone, in the geographical vastness of America was not altogether different from the problem of being someone in the bureaucratic vastness of German-dominated Prague. Establishing an identity was, moreover, a problem compounded by the question of home, a question that was important both to the immigrant and to the Czech. “I want above all to get home,” Karl points out early in the novel. By “home,” he literally means the house of his Uncle Jacob but, figuratively, he is referring to that dream of a familiar place where he will feel secure, understood, accepted: the garden from which Karl, like Adam, has been banished. Because of his original sin, he has been condemned to wander the earth in search not only of a home, or refuge, but of justice and mercy as well. As he comes to realize, however momentarily, “It’s impossible to defend oneself where there is no good will.” What this sudden revelation suggests is that the absence of mercy, whether human or divine, makes justice impossible. Just as important, this situation renders all Karl’s efforts not only existentially futile but—and this is Kafka’s genius—comically absurd as well. The chance encounters that characterize the novel, the arbitrary exercise of authority by those who are in power (parents, uncles, head porters, and the like),the uncertain rules and regulations, and the various characters’—especially Karl’s—precarious status constitute Kafka’s fictional world.
That the Statue of Liberty holds aloft a sword instead of a torch and that a bridge connects New York City and Boston unsettle the reading by placing an essentially realist novel close to the realm of fantasy. Much of that fantasy is dark and disturbing, but by the end — first editor Max Brod says Kafka quit while on his intended last chapter — Karl has reached the wide open West, where he seems reborn as a bit actor in “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” Kafka would go on to write better and more labyrinthine tales, but his first novel is an intriguing vision of America.
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Call number
FIC A4 Kaf