Epilogue #4

The Rehearsal
Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton has received plenty of attention this year for her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries. It was an interest in this novel -- seemingly written in a historiographic metafiction-esque style, and compared by some to the much-beloved-by-me series Twin Peaks -- that led me to check out first (as I'll be reading The Luminaries at some point in the new year) Catton's comparatively short debut novel, The Rehearsal.

Funnily enough, The Rehearsal's small-scale, yet ambitiously and originally presented, narrative brought to mind Twin Peaks -- though presumably in a different way to how The Luminaries' story of murder and greed did to its critics. I say this because The Rehearsal's story - largely about how the discovery of an affair between a teacher and his student has a 'rippling effect' across a small community of people - echoes, in a way, how David Lynch and Mark Frost's series presented the cataclysmic aftermath of Laura Palmer's death; as well as in how such an aftermath reveals and explores in some depth the strange 'micro-culture' of secondary school-age teenagers, to which adults are (against their wishes) excluded.

Though Catton's experimentation -- a chronologically fragmented non-linear narrative, elements of metafictional play, an modernist / expressionist favouring of heightened subjectivity -- may initially seem daunting and off-putting to some, I personally felt that these elements were used very effectively. Catton has praised the ever-evolving narrative form of the 'box set' TV series, and I think it shows in this novel in how - like with series like The Sopranos or Lost - narrative complexity and unorthodox devices are utilised in a more accessible fashion; in a way that is intended more to propel the reader's interest and engagement with the story than to shock or subvert.

Overall, I highly enjoyed The Rehearsal's effortlessly ambitious and brilliantly observed microscope-view of its small-scale settings and characters -- managing even, with its sort of ironic punchline of an ending, to conclude the novel in a satisfying way and without compromising this dedication to its understated and grounded setting -- and I look forward to seeing how The Luminaries will present such exciting originality on a contrastingly larger scale.

Epilogue #3

Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared
Franz Kafka

Before I started reading from the compilation of Franz Kafka's three (unfortunately all unfinished) novels, Amerika was the one I had the least knowledge of. Little bits of information that I gained from the acclaimed literary journal Wikipedia had formed some expectations in my mind -- the description of the novel as more realistic and humorous in tone and the stated influence of Charles Dickens had me expecting something slightly different to what we may traditionally think of Kafka-esque.

As it happened, I was right in some ways and wrong in others. Though Amerika is less surrealist / absurdist in tone to some of Kafka's other works and is, in a way, more overt in its social commentary, there's still a lot about it that is unmistakeably from the mind of the Franz Kafka we all know, love, and credit for our profound feelings of anxiety about the contemporary, post-Twentieth Century age. His representation of the real nation of America, for example, is noticeably expressionistic rather than deliberately accurate in a realist sense (famously, Kafka never visited America in his lifetime, basing his novel largely on acquaintance's accounts and books about travel): it is presented as a sort of exaggeration of America in many ways -- sprawling, relentlessly fast-paced, modern and highly industrialised, bureaucratic, capitalist, and rife with social injustice.

From the very first chapter (which is also, under the name of 'The Stoker' published as a short story in many collections of Kafka's fiction) we are introduced to this portrayal of America -- the first sight of protagonist Karl Rossmann's new life in America is the Statue of Liberty holding a sword (a factual error viewed by many as deliberate symbolism), and as this first chapter develops, the reader - without even being taken off of the boat that Karl comes in on - gains a small, yet highly detailed (and, in some ways, foreshadowing) glimpse of America, its brutally hierarchical nature, and the simultaneous wealth of fascinating opportunities and terrifying perils that this nation has to offer to Kafka's protagonist.

As with The Trial, the ending of Amerika is of particular note. Once again, the novel's ending is a fragment chronologically removed from the previous chapter -- this is particularly noticeable in Rossmann's delight at re-meeting a character that was never present in the completed sections of Amerika -- and, again like The Trial, this lends an even stronger Kafka-esque sense of dreamlike strangeness and sinister surrealism to what would already have been a dreamy, strange, sinister, and surreal closing chapter. Though, in many ways, detached from the rest of the novel; I nonetheless felt that this ending fragment did serve as a very fitting conclusion to the novel, especially as I read its blend of optimism and off-kilter strangeness as a sort of warped mirror of the novel's opening chapter's curious blend of optimism and melancholy bleakness; raising the interesting closing question as to whether this new beginning will just end up like Rossmann's other less well-fated 'new beginnings' during his time in America.

Although Amerika isn't considered to be as influential or canonical as works like 'Metamorphosis' or The Trial, its nonetheless another fascinating, if tragically unfinished, novel from a fascinating, unique writer; and, with its social commentary and questioning of aspirational, individualistic American values and of the idea of 'the American Dream', undoubtedly is a novel that invites comparison with a multitude of later more widely-acclaimed works of fiction that have trodden that ever-fertile thematic ground.

Expect a final Kafka Epilogue on The Castle soon, once I've read that (which I'll likely get to after reading Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal).