Sonata in K

by Karen An-hwei Lee

Who is Kafka-san? Is he a digitally remastered hologram of the famous writer? Or a golem engineered from a finger-bone excavated from a grave in Prague? Or just your garden-variety flesh-and-blood clone? No one is quite sure, least of all K, a Nisei woman hired to be Kafka-san’s interpreter and chauffeur through millennial Los Angeles. In resplendent, incandescent prose, Karen An-hwei Lee fashions this short, strange trip out of a mind meld between the Czech fabulist of bureaucracies and a sun-hammered late-empire sprawl.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2017

Reviews

[Lynn Lipinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

More poetic than plot-driven, author Karen An-hwei Lee drives readers of "Sonata in K" around downtown L.A., Koreatown and mid-Wilshre alongside a living, feeling, eating hologram of Franz Kafka in her Prius. Delicate, beautiful language wraps Southern California in elegant phrases and descriptions. I heard An-hwei Lee speak about this book, saying it emerged from a series of notes she wrote to herself about what Kafka might say during bureaucratic meetings at the university where she works.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Karen An-hwei Lee’s Sonata in K sits comfortably between Barnes’s Nightwood and McCourt’s Mawrdew Czgowchwz, or Nabokov’s Lolita and Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat, or Jeremy Davies’s Rose Alley , and any of Mary Caponegro’s collections: books foregrounding vivid, clever, and audacious prose, a dense, neo-baroque textual surface, where everything is heightened, elaborate and elaborated, but without ever coming across as labored. Speaking of Nabokov, he once stated that a writer combines storytelling, teaching, and enchanting “but it is the enchanter in [them] that predominates and makes [them] a major writer.” Lee enchants in Sonata in K, expertly drawing a fabulist portrait of Franz Kafka, who’s either been cloned from a bone fragment from exhumed remains or a corporealized hologram derived from photographic portraits. Kafka’s been summoned to Los Angeles—a “radiolucent subterranean garage”—to work on a screen adaptation of an alleged work of his, Lee deftly weaving together deadpan dialogue, poetry, recipes, bits of German and Japanese, and excerpts from Kafka’s letters, all playfully shedding new light on the famed absurdist’s doubts, quirks, phobias, and familial tensions.

[Jamie Barringer (Ravenmount) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book starts off as a bit of fanciful fan-fiction about a woman who somehow gets to escort Franz Kafka around modern Los Angeles. Ultimately this is actually a sci-fi novella, though, and while I found the first few sections tedious (I am not a poetry fan) the story was pretty good once the sci-fi element picked up a bit.
If you like poetry, Kafka, fan-fiction, or creative modern sci-fi, you might like this book, and it's short, so if you are not thrilled with it, it is still a short read.

[Carly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really enjoyed reading this novel. The form was unusual, but everything worked for me. I recommend at least a quick review of Franz Kafka’s Wikipedia bio as to enhance the enjoyment of the novel.

[Zorayda Montemayor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Confused