Exciting Food for Southern Types (Penguin Great Food)

Pellegrino Artusi
Penguin 2011, Paperback, 128 pages, £6.99

Exciting Food For Southern Types is a gourmet’s book. It’s hardly about cooking at all, and the recipes are sketchy and difficult to follow.

In common with a lot of other 19th century cookbooks (this is, in fact, a sort of greatest hits anthology. Pellegrino Artusi, the author, is best known for Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, published in 1891) there is a lot of knowledge assumed and your hand isn’t as tightly held as it might be by modern writers, keen to pick up where Delia Smith left off. In some recipes the technique is barely touched upon, although he does at least give comprehensive lists of ingredients, complete with quantities.

In describing the pleasure of eating, though, he’s completely at home and prone to long, deliriously happy passages about how much he loves to tuck in. The cuisine is Italian and some well-known dishes such as minestrone (complete with an anecdote about cholera) and cacciucco are here, but there’s very little of the pasta and risotto varieties that modern italian cooks go for. Little birds abound, as do almonds and spices but you won’t be reading this in the kitchen anyway so the actual ingredients don’t matter so much. This is a book for reading. For example:

‘All you drinkers out there can put your forks down; this herring is not for your jaded palates.’ (from ‘Civilised herring’)

‘Dear Mr Meat Loaf, please come forward, do not be shy. I wish to introduce you to my readers. I know that you are modest and humble because, given your background, you feel inferior to many others. But take heart and do not doubt that with a few words in your favour you shall find someone who wants to taste you and who might even reward you with a smile.’

‘Cheer up, for if you eat these cookies you will never die, or you will live as long as Methuselah.’ (From ‘Health cookies’)

All of the above recipes are just about possible to cook from the information given, but only if you fill in the gaps yourself. Cooking, as Artusi says, is a troublesome sprite, especially if you try to cook from this book. Reading, however, is a delight.

Nose to Tail Eating is playful and spirited in its own way but rejects Artusi’s frilly style in favour of beautifully executed brevity and simplicity. Each page has a list of ingredients on the left, a paragraph or two of explanation in bold on the right followed by some idiosyncratic but exact instructions below.

Nose to Tail Eating

Anthony Bourdain (Introduction)
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2004, Hardcover, 256 pages, £16.99

The cuisine here is British, and the comparison in style between the two books illustrates the differences in the food perfectly. Where Exciting Food For Southern Types is rambling and drawn-out like a long lunch in the sun, Nose to Tail Eating gets straight down to the business of cramming as much deliciousness as possible onto one plate. It’s hungry and eager where Artusi is verbose and anecdotal.

Which isn’t to say it’s unsophisticated, but it’s a modern, British sophistication that contrasts sharply with Victorian-era Italy. The style of writing reflects the restaurant, St John, that the recipes come from. It’s funny and readable (the recipe for haggis, in particular, is wonderful) but you could cook from it every day and be very well fed indeed.

The authors of Canteen: Great British Food clearly love St John and have taken its message that simple British food has nothing to be ashamed of to heart. Their restaurants offer good food and they can show you how to make some really excellent piccalilli but I can’t work out if their hearts are really in it.

Canteen

Patrick Clayton-Malone
Ebury Press 2010, Hardcover, 224 pages, £17.99

British food is clearly fashionable, and it’s hard to know how to feel about that. On the one hand it might speak of a nation at ease with its own identity, happy to live in its own house instead of constantly aspiring to recreate the food of its neighbours, or it could just be irony making its way onto our tables.

I strongly hope not. To take your own cuisine and offer it with a knowing wink rather than a genuine belief that a good meat pie can be as delicious as bouillabaisse is a cowardly betrayal. Food, especially restaurants and publishing, can be faddy and capricious and that can lead to centuries of tradition and quiet good work being consumed in the fire of reviews and development meetings. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here, and I’m absolutely certain it’s not at St John. Fingers crossed, and bon appetit.

Related posts:

1. Edwardian Entertaining by Christine Smeeth (Ian’s book 2, 2011)
2. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and All About Steve by Fortune Magazine (Shane’s books 36 and 38, 2011)
3. The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri (Ian’s book 4, 2011)

Diamonds are Forever

Ian Fleming
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99

Oddly for a secret agent, James Bond has been roped in to investigating a diamond smuggling operation. A dentist in Africa gives the stones to a man in a helicopter who takes them to London to be cut, and they’re sent off to America to be sold.

The plot is quite straightforward, more of a yarn than a crime drama, with events unfolding one after the other with little action required on Bond’s part beyond turning up shooting whoever needs to be shot. He meets and falls in love with his contact, Tiffany Case, continues his friendship with Felix Leiter, goes from the east coast to Las Vegas and the villain’s hideout. In this case, it’s an abandoned western town, complete with saloons, boardwalks, stetson hats, chaps and a handsome old steam train.

He is tortured, the girl helps his to escape and he does his secret agent bit, killing the bad guys in a spectacular set piece.

It’s easy to see the origins of contemporary action films and thrillers in these early Bond books. The 1960s Pan edition I bought at a jumble sale when I was 7 is now yellowed and cracked, but the promotional blurb on the back describes it perfectly: ‘Supersonic John Buchan’.

Buchan’s heroes tend to drive around having things happen to them, just as Bond turns up with a gun and a girl. Where Richard Hannay might get the train to Newton Stuart and eat sandwiches in country pubs, however, Bond flies first class to New York, dines on steak and clams and drinks meticulously-described cocktails.

The modern furniture in hotel rooms is detailed (‘well designed and made of a silvery wood that could have been birch’) along with the air conditioning and the television (‘with a seventeen inch screen’). Bond and Leiter have conversations about salad dressing and cuts of beef while they’re not dodging bullets or whooshing around in exotic cars. There’s an exciting world away from dreary old Britain, Fleming is saying, and the keys to it are these brands, these locations, this lifestyle.

Gambling is also much discussed and portrayed as something with very little chance element. The old women at the slot machines are to be pitied for their monotonous quest to pour as much money as possible onto the casino’s balance sheet, the dealers are well-drilled sharps whose main skill is to facilitate the money laundering that goes on at the 21 tables and horse racing is pure theatre. Despite everyone being aware of the crookedness Bond still goes on with the gambler’s superstitions and excitement. The chance element might be a fiction, but it’s one that it appears is worth maintaining.

The longing for domesticity can’t be suppressed indefinitely though and after a while the old desires for children, a settled home life and, above all, toast and sauce bearnaise make themselves felt and Bond installs Case in his flat and covers up his intentions – a permanent relationship – from M in his report. The character develops a little and From Russia With Love looks enticing on the bookshelf.

Related posts:

1. Noir by Robert Coover (Shane’s book 1, 2011)
2. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)
3. The White Lioness by Henning Mankell (Ian’s book 5, 2011)

Take Your Eye Off the Ball [With DVD]

Pat Kirwan
Triumph Books (IL) 2011, Spiral-bound, 288 pages, £15.94

The main changes are in updated examples from last season as well as new sections on this year’s NFL Draft and an added chapter on the special teams game.

Other significant changes are to the packaging of the book. It has expanded margins, to facilitate annotation, and is now ring-bound to make it a little sturdier for repeated reference. There’s also a DVD, which features Kirwan explaining many of the book’s key concepts with the aid of a whiteboard and a marker. It’s fascinating if you’re an NFL fan but soporific if you’re not.

As I wrote in my review in March, this is only for those who already understand the basics of American football. Kirwan assumes a degree of familiarity with the rules and terminology. For all those beyond the novice level, this is an extraordinary resource.

My understanding of the game increased after the first reading and so, as the start of the NFL season approached, I was keen to read it again. I wasn’t disappointed: I got just as much out of a second reading. There is so much here, in fact, that I will probably read it again before the next season begins, just to reinforce what I’ve learned.

I recommend this to all NFL fans.

Related posts:

1. Take Your Eye Off The Ball by Pat Kirwan (Shane’s book four, 2011)
2. Reading list: five books about football
3. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson (Shane’s book 21, 2011)

Doctor Zhivago

Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)
Harvill Secker 2010, Hardcover, 544 pages, £20.00

Pasternak famously accepted and then refused the Nobel prize which was awarded in large part for his novel, and it was only in the dying days of the Soviet Union that it was published in his homeland. It originally appeared in Italian translation and quickly afterwards in an English version. The translators this time are the renowned husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and this is the first new version in English since its original appearance in the late 1950s.

Pasternak’s reputation in Russia is like that of Pushkin – his every word is worshipped, and his work is thought to be untranslatable because of the specifically poetic way that he used the Russian language. Having no Russian myself beyond tourist language (asking for matches a speciality), I can’t judge whether the new translation is successful, but it does not seem to be a significant advance on the old translation to me. I haven’t done line by line comparisons, but rather relied on my memory of the first couple of times I read the novel in the older translation. It may be that it’s my opinion of the novel itself that has changed, or that the new translation lacks the magical quality of the older translation, I’m not sure. But it certainly feels diminished here.

I noticed some things I’d never noticed in the novel before. The first was just how many coincidences the plot relies on, not least the central one of Antipov turning out to be Strelnikov (or vice versa); indeed the novel opens with a gigantic coincidence featuring nearly all of the main characters of the novel. Second was the number of trains – again in the opening scene, the workers’ uprising, Yuri’s family’s migration to the East, Strelnikov’s special train and so on. Third, and perhaps most important, was the extent to which the novel is critical of the Russian Revolution. Perhaps this is brought out more strongly in the new translation, or perhaps I am just better informed about the Revolution than I was when I first encountered the novel.

Despite these new (to me) discoveries, the astonishing lack of romanticism is still there, and its refusal to provide the culminations we want hits as hard as ever. It’s this that makes the film such a disastrous rendering: it seems to me that Pasternak’s novel is harsh, unsentimental and, ultimately, bleak and soaked with failure. Like Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, he turns away from the most intimate moments, even deliberately interrupting Zhivago’s adulterous idyll with Lara in her infested flat with his abduction and conscription by Red Partisans. The plot is often incoherent and it’s frequently difficult to tell characters apart or to keep track of time. I think this is deliberate on Pasternak’s part – the storm of events and their randomising effects on people’s lives is one of his main themes.

To my mind, Doctor Zhivago is a flawed masterpiece. It is quite frequently heavy going, and its structure is somewhat unwieldy. Its reliance on coincidence is a major weakness, for all that Pasternak must have used this device knowingly and deliberately. If he used it ironically, then I missed the irony entirely. It’s impossible to judge the quality of his prose once translated, of course, and so we are left only with the husk of a novel that Russians revere. His great-niece eviscerated the new translation in detail in the Guardian, with specific line by line criticisms, although many of these come because she belongs to a different school of translation (make it sound like it was written in the target language, even if that means taking liberties with the text) than Pevear and Volokhonsky do (preserve fidelity to the source text at all costs). But she scores some important points, particularly with regard to the new translation’s apparently tin ear for colloquial Russian.

A new translation of a great novel is always an important event, providing the opportunity to view the book from another angle. But the next time I read Doctor Zhivago, it will be in the older translation; the new one, for all its supposed precision, robs it of its red hot core and leaves it lessened as a result.

Related posts:

1. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Shane’s book 8, 2011)

The Discomfort Zone

Jonathan Franzen
Harper Perennial 2007, Paperback, 195 pages, £8.99

I read The Discomfort Zone in 2006, when it was first published, and was struck by the similarities between the author’s own life and the fictitious lives he conjures up in The Corrections (which I had read several years earlier). The reviews that nudged me towards The Discomfort Zone had focused on the self-deprecating humour Franzen uses to the lever his personal history to a mass-market-appeal level of funniness and universality. On first reading, several years ago, I was disappointed: not so funny. What humour there was was muffled by details; the anecdotes themselves were too few and far between. Yet four years later, it’s a different book – or more accurately, I am a different reader.

Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom.

I suspect that on my first reading of The Discomfort Zone, mid-twenties and still wholly unsure of who I was and how to be whomever I should be, that I was too self-conscious to appreciate the absurdity and wastefulness of the condition, a theme Franzen riffs on from start to finish. He does this sincerely, too: you get the feeling the man isn’t yet fully at home in his own skin and still feels bad about it.

Franzen anchors his memoir on the idea of two selves, that as a child he had an external self, which he projected for his parents and which curiously resembled a 50-year-old man more than an eight-year-old, and a secret internal self: messy, desirous, unbridled, curious but afraid of asking and exploring for fear of standing out from the crowd. This motif resonated with me: weren’t we all that way, and didn’t it take us forever to realise it! His realisation of another, less punitive way of being – a realisation brought on by reading Kafka and analysing a quirky teacher – is another marker on the path to adulthood, so obvious once you see it but bloody invisible until you’re ready to do so:

A man could be a sweet, sympathetic comically needy victim and a laviscious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

The Discomfort Zone is funny at points, but it is consistently more thoughtful than funny: a series of ruminations on how we become who we end up being, and how we crawl out from under the crippling self-consciousness that begins to pinch right around the time we begin to grow up.

On the other side of what I hope will be the toughest acts of my shift from child to adult, The Discomfort Zone said a lot more to me – or perhaps I was more able to listen. Worth a read.

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The Anarchist (Penguin Modern Classics)

James White (Introduction)
Penguin Books Ltd 2000, Paperback, 192 pages, £6.99

Thankfully, this is only of tangential interest to the book as a whole, which is magnificent. Esch is a book-keeper who is wrongfully dismissed from his job. He ends up involved in an female wrestling business, although his resentment at the forces that have cost him his book-keeping job constantly eats away at him.

He develops a fixation with Mother Hentjen, the apparently prudish landlady of a local inn. One of the other regulars is the social activist Martin Geyring:

Once more Frau Hentjen felt a little disappointed in Geyring, for she had never given up the hope that he would yet come out with something revolutionary and full of hatred on which she might feed her own resentment against the world. She had often glanced into the Socialist papers, but really what she found there had seemed to her pretty tame, and so she hoped that Geyring’s living speech would have more to give her than the printed word. So to a certain extent she was pleased that Geyring too did not think much of the newspaper writers, for she was always pleased when anyone did not think much of anyone else; yet, on the other hand, he still continued to disappoint here expectations.

The book is full of this sort of wonderfully ironic prose. As I noted in my post on the first part of the trilogy, Broch has much in common with Kafka, including a mordant humour. Here are Esch and Mother Hentjen in the parlour:

But he had seized her from behind, and Frau Hentjen could not move from the spot. She tried to wrest herself free, but they swayed and stumbled among the nuts, so that they almost fell. The nuts cracked under their feet, and as Frau Hentjen, anxious to save her stores, struggled backwards towards the alcove in search of firm footing and something she could get a purchase on, she had a momentary flash of dreamlike awareness, as if she were walking in her sleep: was it not her own doing that the man was being enticed into that corner? But that thought only made her angrier, and she hissed: “Go to your negress … you can get round these sluts, but you won’t get round me.” [...] He was still behind her and had recaptured her hands and pulled them close to him so that she could not but feel his excitement. Whether for that reason or because the sight of the marriage beds reduced her to defenceless immobility, she went limp under his passionate aggression. And as he tore impatiently at her clothing, and she was afraid that now her underlinen might be damaged, she herself helped him as a criminal night help the hangman, and it filled him almost with horror to note how smoothly things now took their course and in what a matter-of-fact way Mother Hentjen, when they fell on the bed, laid herself on her back to receive him. And it filled him with a horror still more profound to see her lying rigid and motionless, as if submitting to a familiar duty, as if she were merely recapitulating an old and familiar act of submission, without interest, without enjoyment.

The most obvious point of continuity with the first part of the trilogy is the figure of Eduard von Bertrand, who Esch becomes convinced is the cause of all his troubles, and who must be denounced or, as he later decides, murdered. But the theme running through all three parts of the work is the disintegration of values. For example, Esch believes that justice is disintegrating, which is why he helps it disintegrate further by taking it into his own hands.

I think that The Sleepwalkers is one of the greatest works of the 20th century in any language. It’s a mystery to me that it is almost completely unknown in the UK, and now that the Penguin version is out of print the trilogy is only available in an imported US version, and that’s not easy to find either. It’s high time for a new translation of this masterpiece into English. In the meantime, hit up Amazon, Abe Books or second hand shops to find a copy and read it for yourself. You won’t regret it.

No related posts.

1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin Modern Classics)

Thomas Pynchon (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2004, Paperback, 400 pages, £8.99

Actually, I think it’s really a political tract in very flimsy and not at all alluring novelistic clothing. Aside from this, its primary failure is one of characterisation. One might be able to argue that the dehumanising element of repressive regimes is the main theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and thus that dehumanised characters are entirely appropriate, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when we are granted privileged access to Winston’s mind and yet still find him to be a cypher. Still less that he falls in love with a character as grey as Julia. O’Brien’s assertion that Winston is the ‘last man in Europe’ doesn’t say much for men, and I’m sure that’s not the effect Orwell was looking for.

I am, of course, aware that this is a heretical position to take. Almost everyone seems to have read Nineteen Eighty-Four and found it to be immensely profound. But the novel is capable of so much more than Orwell achieves here. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of better novels concerned with dictatorships, and with the survival of the human spirit in the face of oppression. Why do we seem to revere only this one? (Well, maybe this and the equally execrable Brave New World.) Orwell’s celebrated style – somewhat utilitarian for my taste even in his non-fiction – just feels leaden in his fiction, in particular here. His language never takes flight or surprises you, and certainly never sparks the jealousy one feels when reading a particularly well-turned sentence or paragraph. Novels have to be well-written, surely that’s obvious?

I’m also puzzled by the way people continually refer to Nineteen Eighty-Four as a ‘prediction’ (in fact it simply documents the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union at the time), rather than questioning whether political proselytising is the legitimate preserve of the novel. (Although, come to think of it, if the writing is good enough, what isn’t the legitimate preserve of the novel?) More puzzling still is the idea that Orwell has anything at all in common with Kafka. That requires a profound misreading of both authors.

Anyway, those are my unordered and superficial thoughts for now. Hopefully I’ll be able to expand and polish them enough to write that essay sometime in 2011.

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Hamlet (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)

Ann Thompson (Editor)
Arden Shakespeare 2005, Paperback, 640 pages, £8.99

The benefit of reading rather than hearing Shakespeare is that one gets the chance to unpack this density, and the time and space to think about it anew. The drawback, of course, is that it is robbed of its tension and its inherent drama, the drama which is its raison d’être.

There’s obviously nothing I can say about Hamlet that hasn’t been said many times before, and then more clearly than I could say it. But one tiny detail caught my eye which may be worth mentioning. I’ve long hated the expression ’shuffle off this mortal coil’, which comes from the play. I had somewhat stupidly thought that the ‘coil’ was the rotating earth, although why Hamlet would be shuffling off it (because old? Hamlet is not old) I don’t know. The notes to the Arden edition give it a gloss I had never considered, that far from meaning dying, it means discarding our mortality as a snake does its skin. The mortal coil, then, is the coil of dead skin left behind as the snake rejuvenates. Rather than heading to oblivion in a rather scruffy fashion, we wriggle our way to immortality.

Hamlet is full of subtleties like this, and the search for meaning has not ended: there is at least one line that scholars still do not know the meaning of.

For all its tortured textual history, Hamlet has come down to us as an incomparable masterpiece, as fundamental to our use of language as almost any other document. And yet, like late Beethoven, it feels entirely modern and still presents extreme difficulties of interpretation. It is, to use that word that is so rarely given its full measure, awesome.

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Modern Classics)

Joyce James
Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 384 pages, £8.99

Very, very little writing can achieve the physical impact on me that music can. Joyce’s writing can, of course, be very crude – Leopold Bloom taking a shit is not the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read – but it can also soar. There are a few pages of such outstanding beauty in A Portrait that I was left stunned after reading them. It’s like listening to the late Beethoven Piano Sonatas – a strange, unsettling, complex, profound, delicate, sensual, emotional experience. It’s an extraordinary thing for writing to be able to achieve.

The outstanding example of this is the passage that describes Stephen on the strand, a nice parallel with Bloom’s late afternoon trip to the same venue in Ulysses. It’s rich with wonderful snippets, for example: ‘Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man’s weariness’, or ‘Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slowdrifting clouds, dappled and seaborne. They were voyaging across the desert of the sky, a host of nomads on the march, voyaging high over Ireland, westward bound.’

But it is the close of this section that is the highlight, indescribably beautiful as it is:

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowered no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figured in distant pools.’

Just typing that had me in tears; I simply find its calm grace overwhelming.

Stephen is, it’s true, something of a dilettante, a fop. But he’s a fop seeking the truth, the truth of his and others’ lives. Arrogant as he is, he knows that he cannot yet achieve the art he longs to make, and his theories are just that: theories and no more. His struggle is to find a way to transform his powerful impressions, and the raw material of everyday life into high art, or rather high and low art.

There is much else here, not least a wonderful and truthful account of a sensitive boy’s schooldays. When Stephen’s hands are paddied, we feel it as well, and the injustice he feels is ours too. Perhaps equally poignant are the passages in which he considers whether he has a vocation to become a priest, brutally offset by his later clarity that he does not. And of course there are the first fumblings of his art in his diary, an obvious precursor to the technical innovation of the interior monologue.

No, A Portrait is not a failed experiment, or even really an experiment of any kind. It’s the work of a great artist approaching the peak of his powers. Had Joyce not gone on to write Ulysses, he would probably not have achieved the worldwide fame that he did, but we’d still be reading his early masterpieces, of which this is most certainly one.

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Amerika

Mark Harman (Translator)
Schocken Books Inc 2008, Hardcover, 299 pages, £15.97

Brod named it thus because the novel is set in a Kafkaesque version of early 1900s America, although there are so many oddities about it that it feels just as much like Kafkaland as his other novels. There are obvious errors of research, like the Statue of Liberty holding a sword rather than a torch, and the Brooklyn Bridge joining New York to Boston. None of which, it should be clear to anyone with half a brain, matters a jot.

The opening chapter of the novel – The Stoker – was one of the few pieces of work that Kafka published during his lifetime. It introduces us to Karl Rossmann, a refugee from Europe, sent to America by his parents for getting a housemaid pregnant. In the opening pages, as the ship arrives in New York harbour, he realises that he’s left his umbrella in his cabin, and so leaves his suitcase in the care of a stranger in order to retrieve the brolly from below. He gets lost and bumps into the stoker, who is sick of mistreatment at the hands of Schubal, his superior. They end up in the captain’s cabin, where Karl launches a vigorous defence of the man he has just met. It turns out that his uncle is present, and has come to install him in a life of extreme comfort.

Karl’s idyll doesn’t last long (this is a Kafka novel, after all), and he is expelled from his uncle’s house for visiting another family without permission. The ludicrous harshness of this judgement is accepted just as meekly as one suspects Karl accepted his parents’ decsion to send him to America in the first place.

Although there are still deep wells of despair in The Missing Person, it is still a less oppressive experience than either of Kafka’s other two novels. It is somewhat more obviously funny, and has a greater air of reality skewed than the other novels. In that sense, it is perhaps the most Kafkaesque – in that term’s commonly misused sense – of all Kafka’s novels. His dismissal from the Occidental Hotel, his uncle’s abandonment of him, and his virtual imprisonment at Brunelda’s apartment are typical of this mode.

Events are somewhat more arbitrary than in the other novels, but there is still a profound human sympathy at work, and there is writing of extreme delicacy and insight throughout. As with Kafka’s other novels, there is a sense of profound guilt, and of meekness in the face of the injustices that this guilt bring upon Karl. What’s different is that we know what Karl’s ’sin’ is – the unwanted pregnancy – and all the events that follow are clearly related back to this original transgression. In neither of the other novels do we know why fate haunts the protagonists; we don’t even know for sure whether Josef K. is guilty or not (although the opening sentence of The Trial implies strongly that he is not).

Somehow Karl’s struggle feels even more harrowing than that of either Josef K or K, and this is perhaps because he seems so young. I constantly have to remind myself that he is a young adult and not a child, such is the innocence that Kafka paints him with. It is this offset that denmands our sympathy. Contrast this with the occasional highhandedness of the Ks in the other novels; they’re constantly demanding things and asserting their right to be heard. The comedy – and pathos – of The Trial and The Castle is in the complete indifference of the authorities to the protagonists’ situations. These situations are horrifying because of the way that the protagonists’ fate is decided by faceless forces (can we even call them people?) who don’t care whether they draw another breath. In both cases, their fight becomes a fruitless fight for recognition from the authorities. Think of K sitting in Klamm’s sledge in order to force a meeting with him: Klamm cannot even lower himself to spend the least amount of time in K’s company. It’s not the same in The Missing Person: Karl’s oppressors look him in the eye, which is perhaps what makes the book feel more realistic than the others, and why we are able to comprehend his situation a little more easily than those of the Ks.

This is a new translation from the original manuscripts rather than from Brod’s bowdlerised version. The translator is Mark Harman, who also translated the restored text of The Castle, and the result is similarly satisfying; Kafka’s prose emerges from it like a restored painting, with all its bumps and whorls intact.

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