Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared: The New Translation by Michael Hofmann [Hardcover]

Franz Kafka (Author), Michael Hofmann (Author, Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2002

Newly restored to the original text: Franz Kafka's Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared at last has the translator it deserves.

Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested, "necessarily endless." Karl Rossman, the youthful hero of the novel, "a poor boy of seventeen," has been banished by his parents to America, following a scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into adventure after misadventure, and experiences multiply as he makes his way into the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma. In creating this new translation, Hofmann, as he explains in his introduction, returned to the manuscript version of the book, restoring matters of substance and detail. Fragments which have never before been presented in English are now reinstated including the book's original "ending."

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This fantasy of a New World, so full of a childlike genius...this strange book—Amerika. --Thomas Mann”

“Kafka never wrote a more accurate picture of Central Europe than in his novel Amerika.”

“His writings are the beautiful and fantastic prolegomena to Buddhism which he never chose to formulate. --Aldous Huxley”

“A century after his birth he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern”

About the Author

For his translations, acclaimed poet Michael Hofmann has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Dublin International IMPAC Award, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and The Schlegel-Tieck Prize (four times). He is the highly acclaimed translator of, among others, Kafka, Brecht, and Joseph Roth.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born of Jewish parents in Prague. Several of his story collections were published in his lifetime and his novels, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, were published posthumously by his editor Max Brod.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; New Restored Text Translation edition (October 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121513X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215138
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,077,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ignore the haters--this book is great!, August 10, 2006

By 

Paulybrooklyn - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (New Restored Text Translation) (Paperback)

this book is a delight from beginning to end. it's unfinished, but so are all of kafka's novels (and many of his stories). He was a divinely inspired dilettante, not a professional writer; his stuff should be read the way one reads chaotic, fragmented ancient texts like gilgamesh or the book of genesis, as opposed to polished, narratively coherent modern fiction.
Amerika is by far kafka's most cheerful book. it has his usual themes of elusive acceptance alternating with alienation, but it's quite silly and charming. it's full of absurd situations and odd details, such as perpetual strikers picketing in the streets, an impossibly complicated mechanical desk and a pair of straight-out-of-central-casting crooks. it's a wild european projection of what america was about at the dawn of the modern age.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for the Initiated, but Read Kafka's Other Works First, June 12, 2006

By 

Justin Leiby (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (New Restored Text Translation) (Paperback)

Kafka never finished this novel--his first--and proceeded to write two of the best novels ever written in any language (The Castle and The Trial). Amerika seems, therefore, not to warrant much attention from the casual reader. Kafka's style, which is unrefined even in Kafka's greatest works, will seem downright coarse, almost as if Kafka never intended for anyone to read the novel. He didn't.

Long narrations, tortuous and confusing descriptive passages, and a dearth of action and plot characterize the novel, and may put off all but the most determined readers. Kafka offsets the novel's flaws, however, by constructing a captivating world for his protagonist, Karl Rossman, to inhabit.

The plot is easy to summarize: Karl Rossman is banished to America, and tries to secure a stable position for himself in his new homeland. Kafka's novel is a meditation on the ironies of liberty, autonomy, and status. He takes us inside Karl's mind to reveal the countless deliberations and reflections that lead to independent decisions, but the decisions never generate the desired outcomes in his new homeland.

Unaccustomed to freedom, Karl makes good, bad, and worse decisions, which direct him to experience the highest and lowest echelons of American society. He lives in a high-rise apartment, stands on a balcony amid skyscrapers, and reflects on the unfathomable network of commerce and traffic teeming below him. Conversely, Karl finds himself relegated to sleep on another high-rise balcony, as the servant of Karl's vagabond acquaintance and his fat mistress.

Somewhere in between, Karl works as an Elevator Attendant in a massive hotel, and continuously moves up and down between floors. Much as in the real present-day America, status is precarious in Kafka's novel. Karl's position rises and falls as quickly as the hotel elevators that he attends to, and he has little or no control over which direction he goes. Karl's destination is determined largely by the whims and preferences of others.

Kafka's brilliant meditations on the ironies of modern life are forward thinking and profound. Readers looking for an introduction to Kafka would be well served to start with the short stories or meditations, and to move along to the novels afterwards. I recommend this novel to anyone seeking a greater understanding of Kafka's works, but only if you've already read and liked his other work.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kafka in America, June 29, 2009

By 

An admirer of Saul "Mr Wobble" (uk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared (New Restored Text Translation) (Paperback)

The life and times of young Karl Rossman as he comes to America. This book is often said to be un-Kafka like in that it is filled with people, places and lyrical descriptive prose, but -still-the only way I can think of to decribe the reading experience is 'Kafkaesque'! It is still drenched in Kafkas preoccupations;guilt through innocent misunderstanding or the machinations of unknown enemies;the way our lives are dominated and crushed by circumstances outside of our control.
This book is eminently readable,the slightly surreal nature of Karls experiences adding to the picture Kafka builds up of a man being swallowed up by life.
Unfinished,the book concludes somewhat disjointedly with Karl as a servant/slave,but the book includes the wonderful 'Theatre of Oklahoma' allegory-perhaps Kafkas and Europes dream of what America is or was.