“An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.”— Ruth Ozeki

Andrei Roiter

“The novel, like all art, reaches for immortality, but the unfinished novel is bound up with mortality and the limits of time. In my view, that makes it even more beautiful than a finished novel. We're left to imagine the completion that is forever suspended. How was the writer ever going to tie up such a complicated plot? What was he or she going to do with all those characters and their noisy, difficult yearnings? And what was it all supposed to mean? As we circle these questions, the author becomes paradoxically more and more present to us in the work left behind. We feel his or her humanity because we see the traces of mortality everywhere on the page. These books are marked by the rush to finish coupled with the wish to never end.
     The universe of unfinished novels is large and diverse, full of acknowledged masterpieces, hidden gems, and many different kinds of incompleteness. Herewith a small selection: […]”
—Robert Siegel, BOOKFORUM
Read more…

padlocked and loaded

"The Facades belongs to the same subgenre as Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn: detective novels influenced as much by Kafka as they are by Chandler.

     Generally speaking, in these novels, style and atmosphere trump plot and action, the setting is as crucial as the crime, and intertextuality is more important than investigative chops. Just as we have the collective term for the Southern Gothic, perhaps it is time to name this bastard offspring of Dashiell Hammett and Jorge Luis Borges. Hardboiled Existentialism? The Metaphysical Whoodunit? The Urban-Decay Procedural? Take your pick.
     Certainly, in its foregrounding of its setting, The Facades fits the bill. The crumbling, financially strapped city of Trude, once dubbed 'the Munich of the Midwest,' is now filled with the 'abandoned mansions of industrialists,' and boasts 'the most diverse and effective suicide lobby' in the region."
 — Jon Michaud, The New Yorker
Read more…

Buy all or any of the books mention in this post here...

l'écrivain-ity

"[…] In the neighbouring 9th arrondissement, Les Plumes hotel pays tribute to literary lovers: George Sand and Alfred de Musset, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, Juliette Drouet and Victor Hugo. Set on the Rue Lamartine, named after the Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine, the hotel even has literary quotations etched on the shower glass. And in L'Hotel in the St Germain des Prés district, guests can sleep in the room in which Oscar Wilde died.

     One of the first literary-themed hotels was the Le Pavillon des Lettres, which opened in 2010, a stone's throw from the French president's residence at the Élysée Palace, where 26 rooms pay tribute to writers including William Shakespeare, Émile Zola and Franz Kafka.
     Whatever the conceit, it appears to work; Le Marcel is full, and Laurence Guilloux, director of the recently opened four-star R Kipling hotel, says its leather armchairs, fireplace and library are popular both with the 'young and dynamic' and 'older couples who like the ambience … it's about creating a character, a personality for each hotel.'"
— Kim Willsher, The Guardian
Read more...

"A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul."— Franz Kafka

From: DZine Trip

Transformed

Here's what one of Dmitriy Yoav Reinshtein's photographs looks like on a hypothetical book cover for The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. This majestic, hyper-real close-up of an insect needs no embellishment, and the book itself could do without a cover at this point in its career.
     Do book covers tamper with the text? That's a discussion for another day...
     Anyway, the intriguing revelation in this and some of D.Y. Reishtein's other photos is the transformation of water. The droplets are turned into dense, liquid jewels of a texture and heft that seems alien to us — alien to me, at leasts.

You can see more photos by Dmitriy Yoav Reinshtein here…

And here's the original cover from 1916 (left) and a English translation below it.

From: Wikimedia Commons

From: Big Fake Books and Records

You can buy all of Kafka's books here...

Scribo Ergo Sum

"Franz Kafka was a legal secretary at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (later: In the Czech Lands), where he wrote reports like 'Accident Prevention in Quarries,' and rose to a top office position, Obersekretär. Though his bureaucratic labors bore literary fruit—providing context and imagery for his fiction writing—Kafka came to feel bogged down by the daily grind. 'Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life,' he wrote to his fiancée in 1913. 'So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process.'
     T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. 'This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian,' British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian. [...]
     Says Von Arbin Ahlander, 'We're kidding ourselves if we think we can make a living on writing.' As for the romantic ideal of the leisurely writer life, slowly crafting one's masterpiece in the calm solitude of a big, empty house: 'I mean, that's over,' she added, 'Unless you're a trust fund baby.'
     Though it's rare to make a living on writing, it's becoming increasingly easy to call yourself one. Without any money at all, anyone can publish digitally with the click of a button or, for a price, self-publish a print manuscript. The ecology of authorship has changed dramatically since, say March 1845, when Charlotte Brontë was working as a governess, miserable, and wrote in a letter, 'I shall soon be 30 and I have done nothing yet.' "— Betsy Morais, The Atlantic
Read more...