Fritz Kakfa – Super-Psychosis (Part One)

22 07 2011

(translated by Patrick Bumfzek)


I

As Gregory Shastorod awoke mid-morning from curious dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a small paper cup. Attempting to stretch his arms, he found that he had none. Only a few hours before he had been constructed out of bones, flesh and blood. Now he was a mass of vegetable cellulose fibres moulded into the shape of a handle-less drinking receptacle.

What the heck? he thought. It was no dream. He really was a paper cup, standing upright in the bed into which he had crawled in his human form only eight hours previously. The covers no longer covered him; they merely lapped at his feet like the sea. Standing still at the centre of the sheet, inches away from the pillow’s cliff, he appeared to shun the comfort offered by the bed. Attempts to pull the covers closer, however, could only fail. Gregory had no arms or legs. That he could still see and hear was a particular type of miracle. Read the rest of this entry »


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Fritz Kakfa – Super-Psychosis (Part Two)

22 07 2011

(translated by Patrick Bumfzek)

II

He either fainted or fell asleep – it was hard to say which. In any case it was now dark outside and Gregory was feeling relatively well-rested. His side was a little sore, but the injury suffered from his knock against the skirting board did not seem to be serious. Though it will not heal as easily as a human’s, he thought, a paper bruise can not hurt as much. But it was whilst casting his mind over this idea that he realised that he was not in exactly the same position he had been prior to the accident. Not only was he standing up straight again, but he was a foot or so further over, directly opposite the window. And, once again, he had liquid in his body: two inches of lukewarm water, the effect of which was undeniably pleasing. It reassured him without his having any idea of what he was being assured of in the first place. It was good, because it felt good. For want of acknowledged certainties, Gregory was in his transformed state indebted to gut reactions. There were no other foundations on which to construct fresh strategies.

His room being without curtains, and his current position being in line with the window, Gregory was presently partially bathed in the orange light of a street lamp. This light threw itself upon a portion of the floor and of the wall, interrupted at intervals by loose black lines: the fuzzy shadows of the dying tree’s outer branches. Read the rest of this entry »


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Fritz Kakfa – Super-Psychosis (Part Three)

22 07 2011

(translated by Patrick Bumfzek)

III

The faint milk stain that remained on the carpet seemed to have alerted Karl to the fact that Gregory did indeed exist. Either he had always known it, and was happily ignoring it, or else he had never taken the time to consider the matter at all. Whichever it was, a change in attitude had now occurred, and Karl was on a warpath. After days of appearing as no more than a voice to be heard through the thick walls of Gregory’s bedroom, Karl decided to reacquaint his flatmate with his physical form and, a supplementary offering, with a particularly virulent strain of his notably brazen personality. Read the rest of this entry »


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Fjona Uu – Pincers in the Tower

2 07 2011

Fjona Uu’s second novel is a strange beast indeed. In her first, if you will remember, she transplanted other authors’ characters into a setting of her own, infusing a scathing Marxist deconstruction of bourgeois literature with the warmth and wit of someone who secretly took pleasure from this same tradition. The novel worked because Uu clearly knew her terrain, both that of the borrowed characters (taken from novels which she had studied thoroughly as a student) and that of the landscape into which they were thrown (Northern Murmansk in Russia, where Uu has lived for several years now). In light of that, it was a typical first novel; swimming like a sponge pudding in the thick custard of personal experience. Uu even appeared in the novel herself, less than cunningly disguised as the young female writer Oona Fjo who hovers godlike over the closing scenes, periodically exacting revenge on her stolen fictional citizens. The book seemed to be an exorcism of half a decade of studying English literature, mixed in with the new, quite different experience of living somewhat out of the way in Murmansk. And so it was. The author made little attempt to deny the charge. Why should she? The novel was highly successful. As readers, we did not care whether or not she had filled the golden cup of our delight with the transparent liquid of her life, no more than I care whether or not that phrase makes any sense. It was a moment – and we were lost in it. When literature reaches a certain level, one need not worry oneself over how it got there. And yet here I am, looking back at that moment, each of my words coated to a honeyed shine with a thick layer of glazed nostalgia. For the truth is, I want to review Lava in a Cold Climate again – but I can’t. For Fjona Uu has written a second novel. Read the rest of this entry »


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Fjona Uu – Lava in a Cold Climate

2 07 2011

Six disheveled characters drift into a blank white space. They do not know exactly where they are, they do not know exactly where they are going and if they are looking for anything, it is for an author.

No, this isn’t another interminable minimalist production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; it is instead the emotive scene with which Fjona’s Uu’s great modern novel Lava in a Cold Climate opens. The blank white space is not a theatre; it is the icy landscape near Murmansk in Northern Russia. And the characters, for all their confusion, do at least know their names. They are Matthew, Cedric, Bertie, Madeleine, Celia and Eddy.

Such names invoke not only a distinct geographical location, but also an erstwhile epoch. What are people with such quaint monikers doing tramping along the shores of the Artic Ocean in the twenty-first century? They are indubitably displaced, wrenched from their familiar surroundings; not only to our, but also to their, surprise.

The truth is this: in a move not unknown in the history of European Literature, Fjona Uu has declined to personally concoct the characters with which she populates her narrative. Either she draws them directly from life, or she pulls them (kicking and screaming in this case) out of other books. In this case, she has stolen characters from three other writers Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Greatest European Novels


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