Status Updates From Amerika

Karl is argued into sticking around Delamarche’s apartment with the horrifying Brunelda.

The back states that this is Kafka’s first and funniest novel but that is by virtue of the fact that it’s his least depressing. Its absurdity warrants guffaws and sometimes gets a smile but there is precious little levity to be found among Karl’s misadventures.

Karl’s turn of fortune is basically foundational paranoia. Robinson torpedoes his current job and the Head Porter despises him so much that he takes Karl to what is basically a dungeon in order to dress him down, further complicating any reunion with Therese and his effects, and he takes the cab unwisely with Robinson, only to be further waylaid when a policeman takes interest in the scene that the cabbie makes.

In a painful moment, after practically thriving as a lift boy at the Hotel Occidental, Karl loses his job because one of the two jerks that had been fleecing him on the way to the hotel shows up fantastically drunk so that Karl has to leave his post in order to remove him from view of the guests. I really hate it because he was getting comfortable and enjoying his time with Therese, the typist.

Karl allows himself to be talked into visiting one of his uncle’s friends, clearly against the will of his uncle. This works out poorly for him—partly because he has a horrible time and his friend’s daughter, Klara, beats the shit out of him using jiu-jitsu, but mostly because this is used by his uncle the senator as a pretense to break with Karl entirely, abandoning him to the wiles of America.

I was expecting something a little more absurd than what I’ve read so far but the way in which Karl quickly takes to the stoker and then is found by his uncle is a little out of the ordinary. Karl has a very naive idea of how the audience with the captain was going to play out, but he’s a seventeen year old German immigrant. He quickly acclimates to English under his uncle, the senator.