K is for Kafka

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Abstract

The plot of Sonata in K, Karen An-Hwei Lee’s lyrical homage to Franz Kafka, comes straight out of Hollywood science fiction: The author of The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Trial (1925) has been reanimated, cloned “from a finger-bone illegally excavated from a grave in Prague” or possibly replicated as “a hologram designed from one of [his] photographs.” Summoned to twenty first century Los Angeles by an enigmatic directorproducer duo to work on a film, Kafka relies on K, his Japanese-American interpreter and the novel’s narrator, to help him make sense of the intervening years since his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1924. Debut novelist Lee, a poet and critic, hits the customary comic notes of the fish-outof-water conceit. Familiar devices baffle the anachronistic writer, who refers to an elevator as a “claustrophobic room” that levitates. He would likely not be impressed with the panoply of milk and milk substitutes that fill the shelves of today’s big-box stores: “Whole milk is fat with butter. One can see the gold flecks in whole milk, layered with butter-fat cream on top. Amerikan milk is skimmed cave-water.” But Lee’s evocative (re)imagining, alternating between prose and verse, hinges less on how much has changed between centuries than on how little. The choice of citrus at a farmer’s market, described in a verse letter from Kafka to his friend and editor Max Brod, overwhelms him in its almost grotesque plenitude: