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K.

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Calasso understands that "Kafka was a verist," or, as another translator might have put it: "Kafka was a realist." Always remaining repectfully close to the Kafka's text, Calasso finds its meaning not by abstracting, generalizing or inferring, but by reading closely the turns of phrase overlooked on first reading, repeated phrases, points made only once in all his works, and phrases crossed out in manuscript drafts. At this depth, it's plain that Kafka understood what's essential about the modern world, and that his cruel and phantasmagorical universe was simply this one. Calasso tells us nothing: he shows us what is already there and that is this: what Myth was to ancient times, Kafka is to our own.

Sometimes when faced with a difficult work of literature, it takes the right work of criticism to bring an appreciation of it to birth. Calasso provides that, or seeks to, in his work on Kafka's novels, whose fundamental plotlessness and lack of resolution can make one throw them across the room. I had always liked Kafka's short works, but thrown up my hands at the Castle, and never even attempted The Trial. Calasso is bringing me around.

I gave this a try, but you'd be much better off with the original Kafka texts, which you have to be lovingly and/or obsessingly intimate with before tackling this commentary. Calasso also plays off his previous book on India's mythology, "Ka" (get it in the titular progression?), and lacking familiarity with this when I started "K.", it further alienated me from C's ruminations. Now, alienation is natural for any reader of Kafka as a response and raison d'etre for being attracted to Kafka, but Calasso tries, probably too faithfully, to replicate the Prague artist's own rhythms on the page. My inescapable distancing of reading an Italian writer translated into English writing about texts in German probably does not help.

The result is a rather tedious, if faithfully stylized, elaboration of the simple insight that "The Castle" and "The Trial" show Kafka's longing for and repulsion from being accepted by and belonging to the System. This would have made a fine essay, but stretched out for hundreds of pages, however attractively bound and presented, makes for repetitive and ultimately ponderous reflections that do more to show how Calasso becomes a disciple imitating his Master than one able to translate the message into a form demanding if not more than as much attention as the original chapter and verse from Kafka himself.

It will, however, send you back to the original texts with a renewed appreciation of their substance and relevance. For this, Calasso is not to be dismissed. Yet the product here reminds me of an impersonator of a famous singer who puts out his or her own records. It's like buying an "original soundtrack" to "Beatlemania" while passing over the Beatles albums themselves. Yes, it does remind us in its own re-creation of aphorism and observation of Kafka's astonishing power to upset and upend our complacent mindsets. But why then take so much effort to try to sound for hundreds of pages like Kafka in making this essential if compact observation? If Calasso had not been an established writer of international renown among the literati, this would probably have languished on the backlist of an avant-garde publisher.

A book like "The Cambridge Companion to Kafka" (also reviewed by me on Amazon) provided more stimulating material, if in more academic than still impressively accessible (for the most part, still being academic!) form. When Kafka inspires mimickry, than why settle for this Calassian echo? If "K." can inspire readers to return to Kafka, especially to the wonderful English translations that have revived what for too long had been rather stodgy Brod/Muir renderings, then excellent. But it is ultimately neither a satisfying substitution nor a convincing coda to Kafka's own incomplete and necessarily unending mission to explore the labyrinths interior and exterior in which we moderns find ourselves wandering.