[kieselguhr_kid]

> In his introduction to an edition of Metamorphosis, the novelist Adam Thirlwell suggests that we have misunderstood Kafka much as Magarshack said we had misunderstood Chekhov, and that Kafka is much more playful than we have hitherto given him credit for.

When I was 17, I read Kafka for the first time and was put off by what I saw as the dour and oppressive atmosphere. I had the same insight as Thirlwell when I reread him ~10 years later: Kafka's works have a sort of deadpan and absurdist humor to them and shouldn't be treated as seriously as they often are. I wonder how much of that humor is lost in translation.

[bena]

There's something to this. When I read The Trial, I was struck by the sheer absurdity of it all. Josef is never charged with a crime, is never coerced into any action, yet at every step remains a willing participant in his own punishment. Up to his own death. It's as if his real crime was not refusing to go along with the farce.

[dang]

Kafka's friend, Max Brod, talked of how Kafka found humour in his dark works - especially the chilling "The Trial", which he thought a hoot, laughing so hard while reading the first chapter aloud, that he repeatedly had to stop to collect himself.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jul/03/post...

[MichaelMoser123]

maybe he was rationalizing his own fate, like Rubashov in Koestlers "Darkness at noon".

A common response by those arrested during Stalin's purges is said to have been "this is a all a mistake, it will be sorted out soon"...

[erokar]

"Kafka was known to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work aloud to friends"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n23/rivka-galchen/what-k...

[version_five]

> Kafka's works have a sort of deadpan and absurdist humor to them and shouldn't be treated as seriously as they often are.

Kafka worked as some kind of minor bureaucrat in the Hapsburg government, and he is making fun of big bureaucracy. I always like to point out when people say something is Kafkaesque, as in "nightmarishly complicated", he himself was inspired by how absurd government bureaucracy is.

[stewbrew]

While "In the Penal Colony" actually is really funny and readable, I don't think much humor could have been lost.

[rukuu001]

I always imagined Kafka thinking '...hmmm, this Samsa guy is a real pest... Let's turn him into a bug!'