The premise of the biography Franz Kafka: Representative Man is that more than any other individual, Kafka truly represented the 20th century in his personal alienation and with his portrayal of the faceless menace of bureaucracy. A fascinating viewpoint and one that becomes more compelling daily, given stories like this one (forwarded to me by good friend Tom Boyle):

Feds Want To Keep Torture A Secret

“If you feel you must give the Bush administration credit for its latest legal pivot in the war on terror, give it credit for having the cojones to actually tell a federal trial judge that the “interrogation methods” (what some reasonable people call “torture”) it has used on terrorism suspects is so vital to “national security” that the recipients of it may not tell their own attorneys what’s been done to them. ”

Click here for the rest.

Max Brod wrote that when Franz Kafka read his own stories aloud, he howled with laughter.

Whether or not he was a humorist, he was certainly a prophet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 2:50 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.