(Throwback Review) This is a book that will remove our misconceptions that we can write a novel about an experience or a place only if we had a similar experience in the past. Kafka is a person who never visited America in his entire life. But he marvelously writes about the intricate details about America through this story of young immigrant Karl Rossmann in America. If you haven't read any books by Kafka yet and plans to read one soon, this will be an ideal choice. It is written in a simp

That's a hilarious novel and a ridiculous situation that Kafka gives us with America. Karl is the king of losers who throws himself headfirst into any new adventure that can push him further into misery and poverty. He befriends people who want to screw him up, and his choices are always the wrong ones. What very well described in this work is the always very exact situation where each reader understands and sees that Karl should not take this direction, and it is all the more annoying that each...

Wonderful! My "first" Kafka....

Amerika transposes the episodic structure of the picaresque (in which the rogue-hero is strung from Event to Event, beholden only to the unfurling of plot) to the form of an anti-Bildungsroman—wherein our narrator, Karl, is not the seat of identity's formation or Spirit’s progress, but rather marches inexorably towards a dissolute subject: the “Man Who Disappeared”. This disappearance is carried out through a series of transformations in status and class: from his commencement in the New World a...

Often I opt to know as little as possible about the novels I read before starting them which includes not reading the back cover synopsis. So I didn’t know this was an unfinished novel when I started. I hadn’t read any Kafka since my teens when I can’t say he was ever a favourite of mine. My feeling about him was further sullied after reading his letters to Milena, a girl he neurotically and rather cruelly strung along who eventually was to die in the Nazi death camps. Those letters are fascinat...

Well my friend Chak says to run from this book - she recommends it for "angst-ridden hipsters who aren't worth the trouble to punch" - which doesn't describe me - I like to think I am worth the trouble to punch. But I saw it in the store with this adorable Edward Gorey cover (totally uncredited) and knew it would be mine all mine. It smells like an old mausoleum but that's what I get for buying a book from the Eisenhower era.-----Wow. Weird, weird, weird. I liked the first third of Amerika quite...

Life is too short. Don't walk - RUN - away from this book. Masochist that I am, I got more than two-thirds through the book and finally could not stand it anymore. Amerika is about a 16 year old boy named Karl who gets exiled to America by his German parents after impregnating a household servant. Just as he was bewildered and passive during the aforementioned fornication (the maid overtly seduced him), Karl remained so for the rest of the book (at least what I read). Repeatedly, and without see...

I am not sure what is a spoiler and what is not, but before I read this I had a very wrong idea about it. This is the most humorous Kafka work. According to the intro he was doing his version of David Copperfield in a country he never visited but learned about in a biography of Benjamin Franklin. I have not read much James Thurber but that is the similarity that I found.

Passages of pure genius, I can't understand why he would not finish it, why he wanted it burnt... But an unfinished Kafka "draft" is better written that any other author's overpolished final piece.

My copy has a Preface written by one Klaus Mann in August 1940. It describes Franz Kafka's life, his very sad life. He had poor health, worked in a gloomy office, never made enough money and with a solitary romance that was "doomed to dreary frustration." He never enjoyed any spectacular success as an author. His works became famous only after he died. Drats.AMERIKA was supposed to be Kafka's light, funny and optimistic novel. It tells the story of Karl Rossman, a poor boy of sixteen who had bee...

(Book 688 from 1001 books) - Der Verschollene = Amerika = The Man Who Disappeared = The Missing Person = Lost in America, Franz KafkaAmerika, also known as The Man Who Disappeared, The Missing Person and as Lost in America, is the incomplete first novel of author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), written between 1911 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927. The story describes the bizarre wanderings of sixteen-year-old European immigrant Karl Roßmann, who was forced to go to New York City to escape t...

Cover of the first edition of 'Der Heizer' ('The Stoker')Publisher's NoteTranslator's Preface & Notes--Amerika: The Missing PersonFragments:Brunelda's DepartureAt a street corner Karl saw ...They traveled for two days ...AcknowledgmentsChronologyBibliographyA Note on the Type

I bought this book over a year ago but decided against reading it once I realised that it was 'unfinished' and I didn't want that for my first Kafka. In retrospect it seems so foolish, but I cannot deny the fact that I'm glad I hadn't read it then because I wasn't filled with the sufficient amount of despair towards the life I lead, to throughly feel this book, to find closure in it's incompleteness.One is easily horrified by the rare and exceptional abominations of the world, but not by everyda...

I had difficulties not feeling like a tool while reading Kafka at work on my breaks. A guy with a beard and thick rimmed glasses read Amerika, just makes me feel like a parody of myself.Kafka is one of those authors young men latch on to in high school or college and inevitably talk way too much about. I can definitely see the appeal with the themes of alienation and a system that works against the well-meaning individual. But there's something I realized while reading this book:Kafka would have...

Another review vanished! How Kafkaesque! Especially when it used to be called The Man who Disappeared. It's probably metamorphosised, gone on trial and banished to the goodreads penal colony.Fortunately I saved a copy:Possible spoilers but the story is unfinished anyway.The story is too incomplete to warrant a higher rating but the writing is good. Well, at the start anyway. This is the bildungsroman of a 17 year old Karl Rossmann, who is dispatched to Amerikafka by his parents. It is quite a de...

This novel is completely different from all the others Kafka's works. I mean, it's not kafkaesque, it's picaresque. Amerika has something of Dickens and it doesn't seem written by an european novelist. Kafka has written about the myth of a new world seen like a land of false possibilities where a new Candide, the young Karl, is pushed and pulled away by circumstances.It's a real pity that this novel is unfinished. I've loved the final and totally independent chapter about The Nature Theatre of O...

I loved this first novel by Kafka, much more sunny and easier to read than his others (even though the chapter on Brunelda is pretty frightening). This is incomplete - but does not matter much as Kafka's stories are dreamlike and disjointed anyway.Kafka never visited America. I was thinking today that whatever is happening in America nowadays is much weirder and more surreal than any of his novels.

A couple years ago, some trickster posted the first page of David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST to a Yahoo group looking for advice about "his" new novel. Not surprisingly, the um, yahoos, didn't recognize the source text and populated the message board with all sorts of terrible advice about the lack of action and the fact that he "knows what to do--just dump it and start over!" Obviously, this provided a shitton of laughs for the literati, for those who respect DFW's writing and know that the...

Franz Kafka just watches, he doesn’t comment…As the seventeen-year-old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child by him, sailed slowly into New York harbour, he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained winds blew about her form.And Karl Rossmann encounters many a

This was originally titled The Man Who Disappeared. The first chapter, The Stoker, was published as a short story and often included in the collection The Metamorphosis (see my review HERE) . It opens with a description of a city, country and continent Kafka never saw: "New York looked at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers." The ship, too, has windows (of course), but there are more references to them than one might expect in such a few pages. Karl is only 16 and has been