A curious feature of Franz Kafka’s prose is that, pared down though its lexicon may be, it resists translation. There’s a good reason for that. Dictionaries supply more definitions for basic words than for those of greater complexity because simpler ones are the roots of vast family trees of words; plain language signifies promiscuously.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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Satirists are famously also moralists, and Michel Houellebecq is no exception. Indeed, he’s a religious writer, even though his scabrous novels usually scoff at established religion.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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Both Franz Kafka and the Bible are inexhaustible sources of meaning because they overflow any box we build around them. They exist on a plane of Western consciousness so formative of ours today that they seem to come from everywhere and nowhere.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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Michel Houellebecq doesn’t just forecast current events; he satirizes them, dryly, with perfect pitch. His mimicry of the inflated language of marketing, bureaucratic euphemism, and hypertechnical mumbo jumbo finds the exact midpoint between amusing and appalling.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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Franz Kafka’s stories are Jewish the way the Old Testament is Jewish. That is, it’s also Christian, and it speaks even more generally to the human condition, and to a great deal besides that.
~ Judith Shulevitz via The Atlantic
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