K. by Roberto Calasso

Author:Roberto Calasso [Calasso, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141990835
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

X. Scuffles and Escapes

Karl Rossmann is the little fairy-tale hero who gets thrown into the world. Serious, tenacious, ready for anything, curious, sturdy. He encounters ogres and ogresses, other boys and girls, policemen and vagabonds, to all and each he speaks as an adult, with gravity and propriety. The sentence that precedes him, which has driven him from his homeland and his family, doesn’t in his eyes compromise or cloud the world, which in America appears above all enlarged and multiplied. “How tall it is,” thinks Karl of the Statue of Liberty, as his ship passes slowly by. He’s not surprised when he sees the statue brandishing a sword instead of a torch. Karl observes, takes note. And this will be his approach throughout: to measure the world, its increasing quantities, its doors, its drawers, its compartments, its steps, its floors, its ever-growing number of vehicles. Nothing could be more natural for a boy who has always “been terribly interested in technology.” No doubt he would have become an engineer if they hadn’t sent him off to America. Karl immediately perceives whatever comes along as an element in a series. And this seriality of the perceived alters first and foremost the eye of the perceiver. He’ll come to see himself as substitutable, like one of the many dotlike figures that, seen from above, move through the streets and quickly vanish. Or else the same figures are simply reappearing again and again. The effect would be the same. Repetition of the identical looks the same as endless substitution.

An inexplicable, irrepressible cheerfulness runs through the pages of The Missing Person. The reason for it remains unclear. After his initial stroke of luck in meeting Edward Jakob, the proverbial “American uncle,” Karl Rossmann’s path becomes ever more harrowing. Every step entails some ordeal and seems to lead toward progressive degradation. But Karl has the gift of the great mystics he knows nothing about: he accepts everything that happens to him in the same spirit. He can tell when someone is hostile to him and can stand up for himself when threatened. But he never grows bitter. Karl focuses on one thing: whatever it is he must do, he wants to do it well. Even in the most discouraging situations he manages to tell himself: “It’s just a matter of understanding the mechanism.” He uses the dozens of compartments in the prodigious writing desk that his uncle procured for him with the same care and precision that he will employ in composing, from an array of half-eaten scraps, a presentable breakfast tray for the obese Brunelda.

Kafka in The Missing Person experimented with something that wasn’t congenial to his epoch: epic naïveté. And even for him it was an isolated attempt. His trick in approaching that naïveté was to take a character who wholly embodies it and put him in a place still capable of harboring it: America, as seen through the astonished eyes of a European adolescent at the beginning of the century. On

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.