Kafka was a dickhead

1 Červenec 1990, Nedele, Praha

Quarter Finals

Czechoslovakia 0 – 1 West Germany

England 3 – 2 Cameroon

GERMAN MONETARY UNION

Managed, for the first time, to finish a text by Kafka. ‘Metamorphosis.’ Then went on to read ‘The Great Wall of China’. I first heard of Kafka when I saw Luka Cane¹ reading a copy of, I think, The Castle. It was, he said, about a man who kept phoning the castle on the hill and all he got in reply was laughter. But it may have been The Trial in which a man is on trial for he doesn’t know what. I’m halfway through The Trial at the moment, but I left the copy at home, having seen someone reading it in the queue for the visas at the Embassy and thinking it too obvious. I remember Kafka’s America in the school library. (I twinned it with Dos Passos U.S.A.) But although I tried reading ‘Metamorphosis’, I gave up soon after starting. I read it with Nabokov’s comments on the exact species of insect in mind. Also thinking of how amusing Charles Plumley² finds Kafka, how amusing Kafka is said to have found his own stories when reading them out to friends and Ossian’s incredulity when I told him ‘Kafka was a dickhead’ for no reason as we crossed the Charles Bridge. I read very little at Bedford Modern School. I remember starting Goodbye to Berlin, battling with Heaney’s Door into Dark, picking up Candide, putting it down, Voss, Herzog, Zola, Doris Lessing’s Sirians³, all books I didn’t finish.

1. A schoolfriend when young-Toby was around fifteen years old.

2. Oxford friend.

3. The Sirian Experiments (1980). Part of the Canopus in Argos series. What younger-Toby did read all the way through was the facsimile edition of TS Eliot’s (and his collaborator’s) The Waste Land (1971).