Thursday, 20 January 2022

Franz Kafka

 


Franz Kafka was a German novelist and short story writer, was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on  July 2, 1883.   He came from a wealthy family and was mostly home schooled before studying law in Prague.  He suffered through a short lifetime from ill health, loneliness, and unhappy love affairs.  This air of depression and despair permeates his introspective novels with the same minuteness of detail that is found in the works of Marcel Proust.

Kafka's major works  were not published until after his death. His most famous novels included  The Trial (1925). The Castle (1926),  and America (1927). Kafka believed in numerous mystic cults and was convinced that he possessed clairvoyant powers. Among his other works were Metamorphosis (1916), The Country Doctor (1919), In the Penal Colony (1919),  and The Great Wall of China (1931).  He died June 3, 1924.


Director David Cronenberg earlier work drew great inspiration from  Kafka's book Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist  Gregor Samsa, wakes to find himself transformed into an insect.   The book has been adapted into a stage play starring Tim Roth and has been reinterpreted in both television and film many times over. The 2006 animated movie Flushed Away has a scene where a stove falls through a floor of a house,  to show a cockroach  reading a French translation of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Another well received novel was "The Trial" where an  near invisible authority has arrested and begins to prosecute a man Joesf K., but the nature of his crime in neither revealed  to him or the reader.  It is atmospheric state re-imagined in episodes of the twilight zone. It can be said that films like Cube, Vivarium, Escape room, and the Saw franchise took a little bit of inspiration from the work of Franz Kafka.



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