Writing about personal failure is always burdensome. Unless the failure metamorphosizes into an individual success or a self-help book. A little backstory.
A few years ago I re-imagined Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” as being set in a Mexican restaurant. And, a little over a year ago, I re-wrote a quote from what I thought came from Franz Kafka’s first novel, “Amerika.”
The original quote reads, “He was irresistibly drawn to new acquaintances, but every new acquaintance left him wearier than ever.” I was shopping in Ikea at the time and thought changing “acquaintances” to “big box stores” would be funny.
I posted the quote on Facebook and received a bunch of “ha ha” response icons. So, I thought I’d give “Amerika” a similar treatment to “The Stranger.” Only this time, I’d reconceptualize “Amerika” as if Kafka set the book in Ikea. Instead of being abused and exploited across the United States, the protagonist, Karl Rossman, gets lost in Ikea.
He would be abused and exploited in Cookshop, the Workspace area and the Home Organization department.
With the idea set, I had to consider the post. I prefer to keep blog posts between 800 and 1000 words for easy reading. So, condensing “The Stranger” to 1000 words was pretty easy.
The book is only 120 pages. It only has fourteen characters and one of them is dead. Moreover, the story is fairly straightforward. The protagonist, Meursault, is indifferent to his mother’s death. And life in general. He kills an Arab on the beach. He goes on trial. He’s sentenced to death.
I hadn’t read “Amerika” in years so I thought summarizing it would be just as easy. I bought a new copy, took it to Starbucks and sat down, ready to abridge. I wasn’t ready for the obstacles that would face me.
Unlike the brief “Stranger,” “Amerika” clocks in at 286 pages. And Kafka didn’t even finish writing the book. Moreover, the first chapter alone has twenty-two characters. Furthermore, Kafka refers to several characters by different names.
The previous summary of “The Stranger” used five sentences. Consequently, here’s a summary of “Amerika’s” first chapter, “The Stoker.”
The protagonist, Karl Rossman, has to go to New York to escape the scandal of being seduced by a housemaid. Karl meets the Stoker (who runs the ship’s furnace) and they become friends. They go to the ship’s captain to complain about how he treats the Stoker.
Karl’s uncle Jakob (also referred to as the Senator) is meeting the captain. Karl doesn’t know Jakob is his uncle. Jakob recognizes Karl and takes him away from the Stoker.
That’s the gist of the chapter. In between, Karl gets lost on the ship. He loses the trunk that contains all his possessions. Or it’s been stolen by a man named Franz Butterbaum. There’s a riot in the kitchen.
Moreover, the chapter’s second paragraph is six pages. Not to mention the critical dialogue among the twenty- two characters.
As a result, summarizing the first chapter to 1000 words and placing it in Ikea would have been a challenge. Let alone condensing the whole book, in which Karl travels the entire United States.
So, I had to resign myself to the fact that this idea failed. The concept itself seemed noble, turning the absurd on its side and making it more ludicrous. After all, when Kafka wrote “Amerika,” he had never visited America.
Just before I began to write this post, I checked the notes on my phone. I wanted to make sure I had the quote accurate. The quote that inspired the idea didn’t come from “Amerika.” It came from a later Kafka work, “The Castle.”
Therefore, I tripled down on the failure. First, not being able to successfully condense the book. Second, believing the quote came from one book when it really came from another. And finally, not checking my notes before I began the whole project.
However, the three failures metamorphosized into a successful blog post. So I don’t feel so burdened writing about it.
Brian's Blog 
I recently got to know about Franz Kafka from Home Movies the with the Franz Kafka Rock Opera🤘🏿… ended up getting an e-copy of a collection of his writings, I mostly set it text to speech and listen, I get pretty much a lot of the stories mixed up, some are quite hard to follow, some are easy, and some make absolutely no sense to me 😂.
Anyway it’s always interesting when we get all fussed up about something to later realize we were already wrong from the start and needed not to have gone through the trouble we did, but it definitely makes a great post 👍🏿😁
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Hi,
Kafka is like that, easy, difficult, confusing and sometimes hilarious.
And, you’re so right about getting worked up about an issue just to realize it was not worth the trouble.
Thanks for reading and glad you enjoyed the post! 😀
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