Reviews for Kafka in Bront

The average rating for Kafka in Bront based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-23 00:00:00 Paul Rego Talk about not judging a book by its cover; this cover is terrible, but this book is pretty good. This is a collection of short stories written by a second generation Eastern-European Jewish writer born and living in Northern England. Her collection often discusses the hybrid nature of her life and her heritage and because of the novelty of this mixing of cultures, I was found very interested and moved throughout, and thought through a lot of interesting things I've had a little but not a lot of experience with in reading. I was also not sure what this book was going to be because of the bad cover, which you can see, but also that this is a small press book from 2006 and oddly has a quote form Jeff Vandermeer on the front, mostly known for Annihilation, so I really did think it was going to be science fiction. The title story is by far the best, but there are other very good stories in this collection. A little too many of them feel like they're covering and recovering familiar ground by the end, however. What is interesting to me, a point brought up in the title story, is how many United Kingdom authors casually discusses Judaism, Jews, and Antisemitism in their writing, and have for centuries. So the reference to Bronteland goes over some of the particular ways in which this happens. But the famous examples are more than enough: Shakespeare's Shylock, obviously, but also Fagin in Oliver Twist is repeatedly referred to simply as The Jew. Even modern writers have a probably unhealthy fascination-Iris Murdoch loves to have a Jewish character in her novels with mixed results.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-21 00:00:00 John Garrett This is a remarkable book but - possibly because of that very remarkability - it seems to have been imprisoned in a forgotten library just as the letter-writer is imprisoned in the last story. I hope this review at least helps toward the book's full release. From the penal colony of self toward a trial by readers, then, by some form of metamorphosis, gaining its due of dizzy heights… The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here. Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.