Word: kafka
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...story: boy meets girl, girl turns out to be his mother, boy kills father. Sophocles told it 2,400 years ago, as have many authors since. But few have tackled the Oedipal tale with as much wit, verve and retail success as Japan's Haruki Murakami has in Kafka on the Shore. The book sold 550,000 copies in its first month on his home soil in 2002, inspiring a sequel comprised of selections from the 8,870 e-mail critiques Murakami received and his 1,220 replies. Kafka has become a best seller in Germany, South Korea and China...
...Guilty, with an explanation. As Kafka demonstrates, Murakami's Japan is a land of truck stops, rock music, Ray-Bans, Hollywood movies and workouts at the gym. But for his youngish, hip, history-oblivious fans, this is Japan. More than previous Murakami novels, Kafka embraces nearly the entire Western canon, with learned digressions on Beethoven, Schubert, Chekhov, T.S. Eliot and pantheons of ancient Greeks. It's an education in a box, much like the small but mysteriously well-stocked Takamatsu library where Murakami's young Oedipus finds a job as live-in caretaker...
...ordinary 15-year-old. As well-read as a professor and alienated as Holden Caulfield (Murakami was translating J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye as he wrote the novel), the boy calls himself Kafka Tamura, though you never learn his real name. He left home because his sculptor father was a sadistic beast who drove wife and daughter to decamp years earlier and who cruelly tells the boy that he will someday kill Dad and have sex with Mom and Sis. Determined to be "the toughest 15-year-old in the world," Kafka flees the prophesy, only to collide...
Preliminary suggestions from faculty members for Harvard College Courses included courses on world history, the nature of color, the European novel from Cervantes to Kafka and a course that would study seven works...
Look under “K” in the fiction section at the Harvard Book Store, and while you’ll find an array of selections by Franz Kafka, Stephen King and Rudyard Kipling, the works of Beat generation writer Jack Kerouac are conspicuously absent...