INFLUENCES #2- Franz Kafka.

My favorite author of all time. Debating Kafka is a favorite topic among literature critics and academics. His work is so strange, so ambiguous, that any number of meanings can be read into it. Was he a modernist or a post-modernist? An existentialist, a surrealist or a pioneering writer of magic realism? A Marxist or an anarchist? I don't know. Frankly, discussions like that make my eyes glaze over. Blame it on my lack of education, but I typically don't dissect what I read in an intellectual way. I respond, emotionally and viscerally. And Kafka kreeps me out. I read Kafka for the same reason I read Stephen King: for the chills.

Everybody knows the one about the man who wakes up one morning to find that he has been inexplicably transformed into a giant cockroach. ("The Metamorphosis") And the one about the man who must defend himself in an absurd trial where he's not even told what he's been accused of. ("The Trial") But how about the one about the executioner proudly demonstrating the tool of his trade: a machine which inscribes the condemned man's crime into his flesh with needles, deeper and deeper until he is completely eviscerated? ("In the Penal Colony") Or the one about the sideshow performer whose entire act consists of slowly starving to death before a disinterested audience, and who finally grows so thin that he is simply lost in the straw in the bottom of his cage, forgotten about and replaced by a performing panther? ("The Hunger Artist") Or, even kreepier, the one about the unidentified burrowing creature fretting about his labyrinth while tormented by a mysterious whistling noise? ("The Burrow") These are nightmares, placed unfiltered on the page.

Franz Kafka was sickly for most of his life, living in the shadow of a vital and domineering father, stuck in a series of Civil Service jobs which he despised, plagued by failed romances, unrecognized and barely published in his lifetime. He died of tuberculosis just a few years before the rest of his family was killed by the Nazis. In his will, he stipulated that all his unpublished works be destroyed. His good friend and executor Max Brod defied Kafka's dying wish and edited and published his voluminous body of writing. God bless him for betraying his dead friend's trust.

The novels were unfinished, but with Kafka this actually works to their benefit. In "Amerika" and "The Trial," the missing chapters and out-0f-whack chronology only add to the dream-like effect of confusion. (I have yet to read "The Castle.")

My favorite Kafka work is the novel "Amerika," (Kafka's original title was "The Man Who Disappeared," but I like "Amerika" better) mainly because it is the most light-hearted and funny of his writings, and also because it presents a wonderfully distorted view of my home country. Kafka never visited America, the nation presented in the novel is wholly a product of his imagination. This is evident from page 1, when the young immigrant Karl pulls into New York harbor and thrills to the sight of the Statue of Liberty, who holds not a torch but a sword. Exiled by his parents for impregnating a chambermaid, young Karl is at first taken under the wing of a rich uncle, but after a typically Kafkaesque transgression, is left to his own devices. What follows is a series of absurdist episodes, Karl trying to make his way in the strange country, plagued by low-life traveling companions, rejected at every turn. Finally, he finds acceptance in the surreal "Nature Theater of Oklahoma," which is reads like the afterlife as the largest, strangest WPA project imaginable.

I actually attempted to adapt "Amerika" into a screenplay, more as an exercise than anything else. I played up the Monty Python-esque humor and expanded upon Kafka's anachronisms and distortions of place. Plus, I added a lot of my own touches, which I'm sure would infuriate literary purists everywhere. The script is unfinished and will never be made into a film, but was still loads of fun to write. Plus, if you want to really understand a book, I can't think of a better way to do so than to attempt an adaptation. (Still, this is yet another case where the book is definitely better.)

So next time you want a good, scary read, forget the King or the Barker. Grab a Kafka. I promise you'll want to sleep with the lights on.