Two cities construct a giant formed of the coordinated bodies of thousands of men, women, and children the likes of which has never been seen on this earth (outside Renaissance paintings of hell and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan).
Tag: Kafka
Weird #31: “The Long Sheet” by William Sansom (1944)
The true meaning of freedom
Weird #15: “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka (1919)
A traveller to a penal colony gets the grand tour of an enormous torture machine.
Weird #11: “The Vegetable Man” by Luigi Ugolini (1917)
The story of a little green man.
Cockroach by Rawi Hage
Rawi Hage's unnamed protagonist—an unreliable narrator—fantasizes almost as much as he steals. A poor, starving Middle-Eastern immigrant walking the Montreal winter streets, he sees himself as a cockroach: the lowest of the low, but also crafty and able to survive. His awkwardness around women causes him to undergo what he perceives as a metamorphosis into …
Rawi Hage and What his Work Means to Me
I counted it a significant turn of good fortune that I had just finished reading Rawi Hage's novel Cockroach when it almost won this year's Canada Reads competition (Joseph Boyden's The Orenda took first prize). It took me 5 years to get around to reading it. Nonetheless, this author—whose book I am reviewing Friday—has had …
Matthew Rettino 