I really really really like Kafka. I am atheistic-ish, and yet I was raised on the Bible--I am the son of a preacher man--and I think it was witnessing such a strong and strange devotion to a book (really a damn good book) that instilled in me such a love of books. But i have never stopped being fascinated with the Bible. It is an entirely strange, absurd, disturbing, often disgusting, always fascinating book. And when I was first introduced to Kafka, I thought he read like the Bible. I still think so. There is this enigmatic and dreamy quality to the stories. I can easily imagine, two thousand years from now (if we haven't killed ourselves with bombs or carbon dioxide), humans finding his work and including it some new version of the Bible. Some new collection of stories that have the whiff of parable, the stink of violence and death and some attempt at making sense of both. I think there will be a Book of Beckett as well.
The Judgement: after reading this again, couldn't help but see how the story is nightmarish, especially for George Bendeman, so much so that he kills himself, there's a crazy level of anxious anticipation, and despite all that the story is not frightening at all. Instead, it's strangely funny, especially when the father stands erect in bed, holding himself steady by a hand on the ceiling, his robes, I imagine, open and still proving that his father is a "giant of a man." Maybe it's this mix of tensions that give it such a dreamy quality, as if there are two intentions running against each other.