Kafka Was the Rage
A Greenwich Village Memoir
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4.6 • 12 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost bohemia.
We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street—indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as “living off the land or sailing around the world” while exercizing his libido with a protegee of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on “the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis.” Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant Beautiful and Poetic
I just finished a very excellent book, "Kafka Was the Rage" by Anatole Broyard. It was from a list of 100 books that David Bowie said were his favorites. The first five in a row I looked for I couldn't find in the Apple eBook store, this was the first they had.
The writing was incredibly good at the beginning. It really hooked me, it was wonderfully poetic. I started with a downloaded excerpt and was quickly hooked so I bought the whole thing. I'm not sure really if the writing becomes less poetic as Broyard becomes engaged with telling his story, or if I noticed it less as I began becoming engaged with him telling his story. I am going to paste a bunch of quotes below that caught my attention. Unfortunately I'm too lazy to re-read it and get some of the quotes from the beginning that really slew me. But that will give you a reason to read it. Some of what I'm quoting below is quotes from other people that caught Broyard's attention, I guess most of it is his. The first two might not mean much out of context.
The story is Broyard's experiences going to college in New York on the GI Bill after the second World War. Besides the gorgeous writing and wonderful soaring ideas, it's a great story of lovers and of people with a fiery passion for ideas. As I almost always do with stories set in "the past", I'm struck by how much the same things are. I always go into it with a feeling that the people in it will strike me as unsophisticated compared to me, but of course I see how much at heart they are exactly like me and people today in general. A lot of things are in fact different, but whether I'm reading something written a hundred years ago or five hundred or a thousand, I always see that the people are very very much like me, they live in a different world, but they think very much like I do. (Which is why I really detest historical fiction that presents people from the past as if they were all superstitious ignorant savages, which is very common.)
“It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire.”
“The sleep-crawler, or moetotolo, visited his lover in her own hut in the middle of the night. This was a tribe that slept in straw baskets to keep away mosquitoes, and the moetotolo had to squeeze into the girl’s basket and perform without making any noise. The whole family slept in one room, and if the moetotolo was discovered, he would be severely beaten.” (This was love-making in a tribe Broyard read about, he thought it sounded like it would be very intense (if I remember correctly, this was towards the start) ).
"In New York City in 1946, there was an inevitability about psychoanalysis. It was like having to take the subway to get anywhere.”
“I thought that being a Communist was a penalty you had to pay for being interested in politics.”
“He was discussing an early still life of Picasso’s, an upended table covered with a white cloth, a bowl of flowers, and a bottle of wine, all paradoxically suspended in space. What we were seeing, Schapiro said, was the conversion of the horizontal plane—the plane of our ordinary daily traversal of life—into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.
His voice rose to a cry. He honked like a wild goose. There was delirium in the room. The beam of the projector was a searchlight on the world. The students shifted in their seats and moaned. Schapiro danced to the screen and flung up his arm in a Romanesque gesture. As he spoke, the elements of the picture reassembled themselves into an intelligible scheme. A thrill of gladness ran through me and my hand sweated in Sheri’s.” (Sheri was his slightly-crazy lover)
“As Tolstoy remarked when he was dying, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.”
“a line by Tristan Tzara: 'The lonely poet, great wheelbarrow of the swamps.' "
(all quotes are) Excerpt From: Broyard, Anatole. “Kafka Was the Rage.” Vintage Books, 2012-01-04. iBooks.
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Brilliant
Fantastic biographical book about an interesting, engaging man ... And the better times when... Kafka, was the rage.