The Trial 

By Franz Kafka

Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925

176 pages

May’s book selection for The Mules was The Trial by Franz Kafka. We don’t often read classics, but I’m always happy when we do. In some cases, I get to read an important book that I’ve never read. If I’ve read it already, it’s even better. Classic books are classics for a reason. You can’t possibly get all they offer in a single read.

Prior to this, I had read only one book by Kafka: Metamorphosis. (I think it was assigned in college.) But if ever The Trialcame up in conversation, I’m sure I would have pretended to have read it. Even in high school, I was well aware that reading Kafka – and these two novels in particular – was de rigueur for anyone that wanted to present himself as well read.

I’m not sure how to describe The Trial. It reminded me a bit of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In both books, the protagonist is involved in the criminal justice system. In both, there is a good deal of philosophical consideration that carries along just under the action. Both Kafka and Dostoevsky have an ability to present a dark, almost fatalistic, view of the world in an unsettling but comic way.

But The Trial also reminded me of some of Samuel Beckett’s plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, etc.) in its soporific pace, simplicity of language, and absurdist point of view. I found myself thinking, “Okay, I get it,” after the second chapter. I almost stopped reading. But, first, I decided to watch Orson Welles’s rendition of the story on film. And I’m glad I did. It was mesmerizing and sent me back into the book with the energy to finish it.

The Plot 

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K, the chief cashier of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. Josef is not imprisoned, however, but left “free” and told to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs.

The rest of the book is like a bad dream. For the protagonist, things go steadily from bad to worse.

The Themes 

We didn’t spend much if any time on the plot. The plot, in any good absurdist or existential novel, is not the point. Our conversation was all about the themes that presented themselves continually in the reading of the book and then came back to haunt the reader after putting it down.

At one level – the most basic, I think – The Trial is about the endless tyranny of bureaucracy. But it is also very much about the existential dilemma of being human in a nihilistic, post-Enlightenment, post-religious world, where finding meaning in life is impossible, unless one can find meaning in nothingness. (An idea that Sartre, among other existentialists, made a fair case for.)

A major theme of the book, which I was surprised most of the Mules didn’t recognize, was guilt – the result of man’s original sin: being born with a self-reflective consciousness and having to deal with its constant reminders of his weaknesses and failures.

Okay, I’ll stop here. I was hoping to give you a sense of how many interesting and potentially pompous topics The Trialcould lend to any philosophical conversation, as it did to ours that evening.

Here is what I need to say. The Trial is, as advertised, a great book. Not great in the sense of “I really enjoyed reading it,” but great in the sense of “If you want to experience why Kafka is considered so important by so many smart people, you have to read it.”

I enjoyed reading this short essay by Calum Russell in Far Out Magazine, in which he lists, “The 10 Greatest Final Frames in Cinema History.” I was surprised at how many I remembered. All but one. That was the final frame of The Searchers. And that was Russell’s favorite. My favorite was The Graduate.

How many do you remember? Which is your favorite?

Click here.

Do you remember Taki? The publisher of Taki’s Magazine? I’ve linked to him before. There are plenty of reasons to subscribe to his digital posts, including the diversity of opinions you’ll find there. But for me, the best reason is the fun of reading about his amazing life, past and present.

Here’s an example, but caveat emptor. Reading Taki may result in feelings of jealousy or self-denigration, as if you’ve done nothing interesting with your life.

Neither Safe nor Effective, The COVID Vaccines 

By Dr. Colleen Huber

Paperback, 232 pages

Independently published May 14, 2022

I didn’t hesitate to get vaccinated when the vaccines became available. My thinking was, “This may not work. But it won’t hurt me. So, why not give it a chance?”

I’m sure millions of others had the same thought.

However, if I knew then what I know now, I would not have been vaccinated. Although there is still more to learn about the risk/reward relationship of the COVID vaccines, based on what I have learned since they came out, that ratio is not good.

On the reward side, it is now indisputable that the early claims about their effectiveness were greatly exaggerated. As for their safety, new reports are coming in every day. And there is more than enough in them to make a reasonably intelligent person take pause.

In Neither Safe nor Effective, Dr. Colleen Huber examines a gargantuan amount of data gathered from governments in Europe, the US, and Canada. And she concludes, as the title suggests, that the COVID vaccines have proven to be only minimally effective in preventing the public from getting the virus and in keeping those that have been vaccinated from spreading it.

In fact, she says, the only positive thing that can be said about them is that “it is possible” (no firm data) that they help reduce the severity of the symptoms vaccinated people experience when they get the virus.

I’ve been following the COVID story since the beginning of the outbreak. And I generally feel that I’ve read or heard just about everything that’s been reported so far. I know, for example, that the vaccine can cause cardiac issues, immune system damage, and fertility problems. But what I learned from this book is that during Pfizer’s clinical trials, patients reported no less than 1,290 adverse side effects. That information was reported to the FDA, but never released to the public until the FDA was ordered to release it by a court order.

Again… that is an astonishing 1,290 different adverse side effects!

When Men Were Brave…

In 1910, Captain Robert Falcon Scott led a team of explorers on an expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole. On Jan. 17, 1912, after a brutal journey, Scott and his men arrived at their destination only to find that another team had arrived several weeks earlier. Exhausted and crestfallen, they began the 700-mile return trek to the ship they came in. On March 17, Scott describes the death of one of his crew. Scott and the rest of his crew never made it back. (From Diaries of Note)

Read Scott’s journal entry here.

An Amazing Story of Endurance and Survival 

In 1971, Douglas Robertson and his wife sold their farm in England, bought a schooner, and set out to sail around the world with their four children.

After more than a year at sea, as they were rounding the tip of South America to begin their Pacific crossing, killer whales attacked their schooner and sunk it in less than a minute. The six Robertsons piled into a nine-foot inflatable life raft and embarked on an incredible story of survival.

If you are in the mood for a chilling adventure, you can read the whole story here.

Foster 

By Claire Keegan

128 pages

Published Nov. 1, 2022

I don’t know how I came to have it. But I know how I came to read it. I wrote a review of Small Things Like These, a book by the same author, Claire Keegan, on Nov. 22, 2022. That was my first encounter with her. I wrote then:

“Every once in a while, I read a book that makes me want to read everything the author has written. That is how I feel after reading Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These….   It’s been a long time since I discovered a writer that humbled me like Claire Keegan did with this book. (The last time, I think, it was Cormac McCarthy.) She writes perfectly proportioned paragraphs. Beautifully simple and simply beautiful sentences.”

This is another small book. And another literary gem. A deeply touching story about a young girl, one of many children in a large family living in rural Ireland, who is sent by her parents to live with a neighboring couple that have no children of their own.

The story is told in the first person. And Keegan does an amazing job of both first-person storytelling and engineering the voice of a child. I was several times reminded of what Mark Twain did with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

What I Liked About It

* The story feels true in a universal way.

* The dialog is rich and authentic in an Irish writerly way.

* The writing is both exquisitely literary and invisible. I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.

What I Didn’t Like 

Nothing.

Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America 

By Hugh Eakin

480 pages

1st edition published July 12, 2022

Picasso’s War was recommended to me by DL, a fellow DM publisher and art collector that I’ve mentioned here several times.

Prior to this one, the only book I can remember reading about the history of modern art is The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe. He presented a wonderfully slanted and brilliant hypothesis about how a small group of European artists in the first two decades of the 20th century invented modern art by stripping away the techniques and technicalities that made traditional art subject to rational analysis.

Picasso’s War has a different perspective. It is the biography of a handful of American men and women who, through legal cleverness and promotional genius, practically forced the American art market to accept Fauvist and Cubist pieces by the likes of Jean Derain and Pablo Picasso – eventually creating the world’s largest and most vibrant market for modern art.

What I Liked About It 

* It tells an amazing story, one I had never heard before.

* It is nicely and neatly written. Hugh Eakin writes with authority, the authority you’d expect from the editor of Foreign Affairs. But his prose is clean and mean, which makes for fast, exciting reading.

* The book is filled with fascinating details linking the great artists of this period to the great novelists, poets, and critics.

Critical Reception 

* “[Eakin] has mastered this material, read a mountain of sources, and synthesized them skillfully…. His achievement is keeping the complex plotline moving, while offering sharp insights and astute judgments.” (New York Times Book Review)

* “Eakin spins neglected yarns of art history into pure gold in this clear, sensitive, and deftly written narrative.” (Vanity Fair)

* “Admirable and enjoyable…. The story in Picasso’s War is well told, with an impressive level of biographical detail.” (Louis Menand, The New Yorker)

Is Mass Murder a Thing of the Past?

Bryan Kohberger, the man who murdered four University of Idaho students in the early morning of Nov. 13, 2022, has been charged. The police found lots of circumstantial evidence, including two eyewitness testimonies that put him near the crime scene at the time of the murders.

But the evidence that has a 99.9998% chance of convicting him is his DNA, which he left on a knife sheath found next to one of the victims.

In one of her typically funny, sharp opinion columns, Ann Coulter wrote:

“His capture illustrates why there will be no more serial killers. As the world gets worse in so many ways, here’s one way it’s better. (Unless the ACLU gets its way.) Between the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and DNA, any budding Ted Bundy can commit one hideous murder, but then he’ll get caught. No more victims cut down in the prime of their lives, destroyed families or terrified communities. Monsters like Kohberger get one shocking crime, not a series.”

I think she’s basically right. The only crimes we’ll be able to commit in the future are politically correct ones.

You can read the rest of Coulter’s op ed here.