This month, if you want to discuss the book with me 1:1, you can choose a time here. If you prefer to send me your thoughts via the written word, you can respond to this email with a letter of your own. And if you feel like keeping it all to yourself, that’s fine too :)
Dear Friends and Family,
I am happy to be writing to you from Buenos Aires where, for the second time in my life, I am losing myself in its great green beauty. Over the last few days, I have spent mornings walking underneath lush canopies of trees, and afternoons in sunny parks, and evenings at cafes that one might mistakenly believe to have existed only in Paris.
After traveling for some time, I’ve realized that all nations try to hide their blemishes, and it is only the wealthy ones who can cover theirs in makeup that convinces its citizens of a false security until, of course, it washes off every decade or two.
Here, however, scars are not easily hidden: They are the piles of purple bills that line your pockets and travel everywhere with you. They are the rubber bands and stacks of cash that remind you every minute of a bumbling bureaucracy not too different from those that compose Kafka’s worlds.
The experience of tracing a city’s scars against such a fantastic beauty is unsettling, and it has taught me that charm not only brings hope, but it can also serve as a reminder of expectations unmet; and I would not be surprised if there is some sort of vague tragedy that beats in Argentine hearts akin to the feeling one has when he enters his dining room and discovers what was his crystal chandelier is now a million glimmering disparate stones.
But it is my belief that this city is full of too much potential not to thrive in the remote work era; and just as the strong dollar and the weak franc helped make Paris the creative capital of the world in the twentieth century, I would not be surprised if the same story unfolded here in the coming decades. I can think of few cities with greater possibilities.
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Since I arrived in Buenos Aires last Saturday, I have continued to contemplate The Trial and, frankly, I feel overwhelmed by the number of layers contained in this book. Through my research, I have read about Kafka’s humor; the way that he plays with our perception of time and reality; his deep examination of the nature of guilt; his perspective on existentialism; and his treatment of depraved sexuality. Additionally, one cannot help pick up on his commentary of the inefficiencies of the state, and its all too frequent corruption, and its proclivity for overreach (a prediction proved prescient by the decades that followed). Each of these levels deserves its own letter, yet these are only a few of the seemingly countless lenses through which to view the novel. Kafka’s dreamlike world is as open to interpretation as dreams themselves.
And even once one has finished examining The Trial, there is an ever-expanding depth to Kafka himself. He had a tumultuous relationship with his father detailed in a forty-five page, now famous, letter; he was trained as a lawyer and spent his days languishing while working the vapid job of determining worker’s compensation for injured employees; he burned an estimated 90% of his writing and, as a death wish, asked for his remaining letters and work (including The Trial) to be destroyed by his friend and literary executioner, Max Brod; he thought that “we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us” and that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
With this understanding of the author, I’ve come to realize that the fantastical prisons he creates in his novels are not fictitious, but are instead the only avenue for entering his mind. When you read Kafka, you become Kafka. You are not given a choice—there is no hiding—and the only escape is once you’ve finished his work and you can try to forget the hell that he embodied. But from the very first sentence of The Trial, you are committed to his overbearing, suffocating, tortuous existence; and by the end you finally understand what he meant when he said: “All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”
Kafka’s singular genius is that he metamorphoses you, and he flings you into the frozen sea within you, whether or not you knew it was there. By doing so, he taught me that there is no greater ambition for an artist, and that it is our responsibility to grasp at whatever tools our hands can latch onto and transport others into our worlds as immersively as we can. By using art this way, it becomes like a pill that one can take to experience another’s perspective for some time in order to come away full of sympathy and understanding.
This may sound simple, yet there are perhaps fewer missions on Earth more difficult, and we are getting worse at it. As the world has shifted to “more immersive” mediums (i.e. images and videos), there are a dearth of artists capable of creating compelling worlds that do not break down.
The quintessential example of this failure is the 3D, “mega-immersive” Avatar: The Way of Water which spent $400 million on a movie where teenagers living ~4.37 light-years away from Earth say “You okay, bro?” and “That was sick, cuz” in-between explosions and unidimensional, bad-faith caricatures of marines. But that blockbuster (nominated for the Oscar’s 2022 best picture, by the way) is not an exception but the rule. It is only one of countless examples of our waning ability—especially in the US—to promote art that creates immersive alternative realities. Unfortunately, this stems from failures at every level of society: there are fewer patrons of the arts; film festivals pull documentaries in the face of unjustified backlash; the Oscar’s is a national embarrassment; and consumers tend towards the simplest forms of entertainment.
Kafka, on the other hand, executes on the promise of his world in every sentence. The prism never breaks. Often, he does this explicitly through repeated external, bewildering, frustrating, absurd experiences; and at other times, he supports his construction through internal subtleties:
Although he realized at once that he shouldn’t have spoken aloud, and that by doing so he had, in a sense, acknowledged the stranger’s right to oversee his actions
Through passages like this one, he reinforces the world by not only acknowledging the madness of it but his acceptance of it; and so, we accept along with him, treating his thoughts as our own, unable to escape because he will not let us, not even for a moment. We become K in The Trial, just as we become Winston Smith in 1984, just as we will become Philip Carey when we read Of Human Bondage later this year.
Great fiction demands consistency and an unwavering commitment to a certain perspective; and if a character whispers only one word of unbelievable dialogue, or the author’s voice quavers for a second, then the entire experience breaks. Indeed, it is a difficult challenge, but it is also one that guarantees a certain truth, no matter how outlandish a certain world may seem.
I am indebted to Kafka for these lessons, and for the fantastic experience of reading this book. I’m looking forward to The Bell Jar next month, as well as hearing from those of you who want to share your thoughts on this piece.
Warmly,
Arjun
This was (finally) the occasion for me to read this famous pillar of literature. Discovering Kafka’s world, is like seeing our own with lucid glasses. Thank you for sharing