In the inverted world of Franz Kafka, guilt precedes sin and punishment precedes trial — so naturally, the cage precedes the bird. “A cage went in search of a bird,” he wrote with enigmatic flourish in 1917, when he was convalescing in the pastoral town of Zürau in the wake of his tuberculosis diagnosis. Two years earlier, he had abandoned The Trial, which begins with an abrupt arrest and ends with a roundabout admission of guilt; five years later, he would start The Castle, which begins with a series of vague recriminations and ends with a series of even vaguer wrongdoings, at least insofar as it can really be said to “end” at all. Strictly speaking, both novels are still unfinished: neither satisfied the famously implacable Kafka, whose perfectionism was a crucible, and both were incomplete at the time of his death. They are certainly cages — clenching, claustrophobic — and perhaps they are doomed to remain forever in search of their birds.
In her Introduction to A Cage Went in Search of a Bird (quoted above), literary critic Becca Rothfeld notes that this collection of ten short stories was written to honour the hundredth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death, explaining that many of these stories, “treat precisely the kind of entrapment that obsessed him: the kind that follows us wherever we go.” I found some of these stories ironically funny, some claustrophobically intense or recognisably “Kafkaesque” in their arbitrary, indomitable bureaucracy, and some…were less successful for me. My favourites were from Elif Batuman (The Board), Keith Ridgway (The Landlord), Leone Ross (Headache), and Charlie Kaufman (This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing), and as I’ve never read anything else by these authors, I am delighted to have sampled their writing here; I’ll be looking for their novels. As for the concept behind this collection: Most of the authors used their space to make commentary on the absurdities of modern life — or the absurdity of all human interaction — and I think that for the most part, they recognisably build on Kafka’s work. It’s an interesting mix and I am happy to have picked this up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Where did it go? What did the surgeonremover do with the carefully removed life-serum? How could you protect it wherever you stored it, from everything? the disastrous heat, the gutter dirt, the pollution, the things that changed, the terrible leavetakings, the journeying? ~Art Hotel
Honourable mention to Ali Smith, who opens the collection: in a strange and authoritarian (?) near future — in which a mother must say goodbye to her children with her eyes to evade the notice of CCTV cameras (as she pretends to be her sick sister in order to save her job at an “art hotel”, with people posing as statues and still life paintings for the amusement of the rich? It’s all a bit confusing) — a family leaves their house when they discover it has had a red line painted around it while they were away; and when the campervan they drive to a parking lot has also had a red line painted around it while they slept, the mother’s friend decides they will simply start walking.
What if they paint the line right over my shoes?
What bright red shoes you’ll have if anyone does that thing to you, Leif said.
Like I said: I found this one confusing — it might very well be the strongest of the collection — but I didn’t really connect with it (yet I do enjoy being challenged by Ali Smith).
As I paused to examine the bush, which appeared to be planted directly into the sidewalk, it turned to face me, and I realised with astonishment that it was, in fact, the broker: a young and emaciated man in a textured, shrubbery-colored coat. ~The Board
In Elif Batuman’s story, a woman is desperate to buy a flat in the city in which she has lived for eleven years (indeed, her family elsewhere is counting on her to succeed), and the narrative becomes increasingly absurd (as she is led up four flights of stairs in an apartment building in order to access the secret entrance to a ladder that would lead her down to the sub-basement), and between this woman’s powerless position and an unanswerable interrogation by the building’s board, this felt the most Kafkaesque. I especially liked the few times an item transformed into a person — the shrubbery was the broker, a cashmere scarf an old man — and this woman’s story is the story of anyone who doesn’t understand the rules of where they find themselves.
Had he been stealing from Kafka? He had never read this Octaviato whatever whatever. Had he? He was certain he had never heard of it. But his memory was going. He understood that much. If this unhoused woman knew it was from Kafka, someone else would, too. Were there other stolen things in the book? This was going to ruin him. ~This Face Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing
Both Charlie Kaufman and Keith Ridgway write from the perspective of men who are unstable in their identities (with Ridgway’s protagonist being the more menacing, with “an axe in my trouser leg, a knife in my sleeve”), and they felt knowingly Kafkaesque (as was Leone Ross’ female protagonist, up against medical red tape: “She understands bureaucracy: if she can just find the right administrators she’ll get a box unticked or a screen changed in no time.”) And while I really liked this, I was kind of ambivalent about Joshua Cohen’s Return to the Museum — in which a Neanderthal in the prehistoric display makes ironic commentary on the museum’s patrons, including commentary on pandemic lockdowns:
Opinions, theories, paranoid conspiracies lowbrow and high-brow and all brows in between and even now I’m not sure that everyone here accepts the official explanation that there had been some sort of plague running rampant globally and everyone was staying away and home so as not to die and the government had ordered the shuttering of everything nonessential such as businesses and schools, strip clubs, places of worship, and concert halls, along with all museums, which as an interested party — as a beneficiary of museums — I’m not going to argue are non-nonessential . . . I’m evolved enough for that . ..
It felt like the main point was to equate pandemic lockdowns with Kafkaesque bureaucracy (including even a Neanderthal questioning the efficacy of masks upon the museum’s reopening), and Helen Oyeyemi’s odd text-message-epistolary story Hygiene seems to be a commentary on cleanliness and what was learned — even to obsession — in the pandemic. Tommy Orange’s The Hurt imagines that the next pandemic will be psychological, while Naomi Alderman’s God’s Doorbell (set in the future, with human-serving AI going rogue and building a new Tower of Babel) and Yoyun Li’s Apostrophe’s Dream (the punctuation tiles in a typesetter’s cabinet bemoan their increasing irrelevance in modern communication) share similar themes of humanity’s tools regarding us as their cold and distant gods. Overall: a strong collection of stories by celebrated authors; much to like here.
