The New Yorker: Fiction cover image

Ben Okri Reads Franz Kafka

The New Yorker: Fiction

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The Importance of Disclaimers in Kafka

I find disclaimers in Kafka, like double binds in a way, to be perfectly honest. And you're like, why do you need to tell me that you're being perfectly honest? Are you setting me up for something here? Yeah. I'm not very interested in the whole matter. Yet it goes into it in great detail. It's not very interesting. But then the language itself becomes quite sonorous. Then we have the last piece with this narrator who's lying recumbent in a twilight for months, waiting for night to fall and reading it over and over. Is he actually in a prison with a captain, or is he just in that state of being about to fall

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