WHEN Franz Kafka woke one morning from troubling dreams, he found that he had been transformed in Hawes's book into a writer – not a prophet of totalitarianism, a tortured visionary, a modernist martyr. Mitteleuropa's most famous mystic proved only t
oo worldly when it came to playing the publishing system, manipulating friends and family or sexually exploiting servant-girls. Wryly comic rather than mythopoeic, his work drew more inspiration from the pornography he so avidly collected than it did from any presentiments of the Shoah. A revelation and a scream, this wonderfully irreverent book ends up paying Kafka a greater compliment than the "K-Myth" ever could by responding to what he actually wrote.
LITERARY CRITICISM BY GARY DAY (Edinburgh, £50)
LITERARY criticism has never been a question merely of what makes one work better than another. Being able to dig Seamus Heaney's Digging or go over the top about a Wilfred Owen war poem has been as vital to our sentimental and social education as to our academic CV – and our skills acquisition for the world of work. Day's "New History", while offering a lively and reliable Aristotle-to-Althusser textbook overview, is never short of personal input, pungently expressed but ideologically off-beat. He takes an Old Labour view on class and its cultural implications, while remaining a conservative – note the small c – on the value of "high" art.
The full article contains 240 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
