peter young’s listopia

Dimitrije Popović   Kafka series #2   2010
J.G. Ballard, 'End-Game'  (NEW WORLDS SCIENCE FICTION #131, JUNE 1963)
In what is probably an East European totalitarian state circa the late 1950s, a political prisoner plays chess with a man he knows will be, on one unspecified day, his executioner. Ballard draws out the tension here in such a way that it's hard to fault him on this story – like PKD he sometimes wrote a little too casually for his ideas to hit home as sharply as they might, but this is a crystal clear telling that shows Ballard at his most focussed and composed. Of all Ballard's fiction it's the most explicitly and situationally Kafkaesque, going so far as to acknowledge as much in the text itself, and the resolution is illuminating as to how the totalitarian rules of the game are designed to push political prisoners towards a self-inflicted check-mate, when the field of play has all along been the unwitting prisoner's own conscience. A frightening story.

Sebastian Faulks, 'Franz Kafka tries to keep up with the world of Mr Gates'  (PISTACHE, 2006)
Hans T (a Joseph K archetype) tries and fails to book a holiday for his mother on the internet. If you've ever felt you were staring into the abyss while watching the neverending whirl of the egg timer of doom, Faulks provides a small and entirely frivolous dose of existential angst.

Franz Kafka, 'A Hunger Artist'  (DIE NEUE RUNDSCHAU, 1922)
A continually fasting man encounters the diminishing public acceptance of his form of art. I like the retrospective manner with which this discomfiting story is told, but like just about everyone I'm undecided about the precise nature of the allegory Kafka is getting at. Clearly, when considering how the story ends, it's focussed on 'appetite for life' or the lack of it, and the artist's reasons for his abstinence depict a man simply at odds with the world around him, much like Kafka himself. YouTube also has a 30-minute film of the story.

Favourite short story of the week: Vladimir Nabokov, 'Signs and Symbols'  (THE NEW YORKER, 1946)
Parents of a schizophrenic man visit him in his asylum, while quiet desperation about his situation informs everyone's lives. This is at the boundaries of what I'd call Kafkaesque because the mental twists and subjective oppression that define such stories are here mostly happening offscreen, but the middle of the story delves further into the strange hyperconnected world that forms the heart of the matter and the third part somehow brings the familial effects of that uncertainty out into the real world. This is a short masterclass in getting under the skins of a story's characters, and is something that transfixed me throughout.