Anxious Pleasures: A Novel after Kafka by Lance Olsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am not quite a fan of kafka, because he takes such a load to read, still, Olsen builds a baroque text that espouses a core of a family drama, that breaks itself apart into different narratives. I suppose each voice should be an “anxious pleasure” and that seems too inbred as most of the voices are of the love and exploration of young girls in a familial setting. Yet perhaps this is only the nest that Olsen is able to best hang together, as each story fragment bespeaks of a forgotten whisper of Kafka. Kafka’s interior pose, for Olsen, becomes the expressed structure, not the literal plot, but half-thought, interluded feelings of anxious rhapsody that meditate on themselves and release to intersect and push each other as an aggregate onwards. Each tendril expresses together as one plot hinged on half spoken feelings, although of course, there is the understood learning, the reading of text by Margaret, another kind of interior monologue of Kafka as so many theorists like to draw out of him, through their wild filters and their linguistic tropes that structure their immanent truths. Of course this one text read by a girl would center on one who reads this text, enchanted by new narratives and theological theories that would read on each other as much as their metaphors read on one another truths the kind that theory likes kafka for speaking about.
They come together as Kafka’s metamorphosis, a sacrifice of all the hard working boys for the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl, as their parents bask in her sunshine. So shall Olsen parrot this gesture as a tribute to kafka, and as an opportunity to weave new feelings from us, from the edges of our awareness, with the right inspecificity (he speaks of almost no names) and therefore the right specifcity. Truly a marvel, a working about nothing, saying nothing and therefore being about everything and saying it all.
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