August Beach Reads

Don’t let your iPhones overheat in the sun. Read a book instead. 

BY

MARCO ROTH,

DAVID MIKICS,

AND

PARK MACDOUGALD

AUGUST 14, 2023

MARCO ROTH

Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

How does Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel—part satire, part fable—about an all-American goy losing and finding himself in a mostly magical Africa hold up? Bellow’s tribal princes, queens, and advisers would not be out of place in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Wakanda, nor, for that matter, at Leo Strauss’ University of Chicago seminars on Machiavelli and humanism. Crucially, for Bellow, the path to full humanity leads through a series of vivid, unsparing encounters with various animals: cows, frogs, lions, pigs. Henderson’s rambling story of an old carnival bear and a roller coaster—possibly the truest details in the novel apart from Bellow’s descriptions of flying over Egypt—crowns the book with a devastating coda.

 

A Kafka for Our Times

A new completist edition of Kafka’s diaries lures readers into the Kafkaesque experience of seeing the author dissolve into an auto-fictional scrapheap

BY

MARCO ROTH

JANUARY 17, 2023

My first copy of Kafka’s diaries was salvaged from a crowded shelf in Bookleaves, a secondhand shop on New York’s West Fourth Street. I paid $2 for each volume—the price marked in pencil on the overleaf. Two standard-size (8-inch-by-5.25-inch) paperbacks slid easily into the side pockets of the overcoat I’d thrifted from my father’s closet. By that point, my senior year of high school, my father had lost so much weight from his illness that the coat no longer warmed him. Although the garment always remained too big, it was plenty warm for me, and I never then doubted I’d eventually fill it.

A Letter on Kafka

 

Franz Kafka

A Letter on Kafka

On faithful translation and who it is for

BY

ROSS BENJAMIN

AND

MARCO ROTH

JANUARY 19, 2023

Editor’s note: Earlier this week, Tablet Critic at Large Marco Roth reviewed a new translation of Franz Kafka’s diaries (“A Kafka for Our Times”). 

Marco Roth notes that an important text in Kafka’s diaries—his first draft of what became the opening of the unfinished novel posthumously titled Amerika—appears in his diary notebooks out of chronological order, because Kafka broke it off in mid-sentence and then resumed writing it in one of his earlier notebooks. Roth then misleadingly implies that the new Schocken edition of the Diaries, in my translation, doesn’t provide guideposts to help readers navigate this: “The reader must stumble on the second half first, without benefit of footnotes or an index entry.” He neglects to mention that the words Continuation of the text from page 256 appear in parentheses and italics before the second half of the draft begins (on p. 86), and that a superscript at the end of the first sentence refers readers to endnote 219, which explains “Continuation of the first part, contained in the Sixth Notebook (pp. 244-256), of the text …” In the Sixth Notebook the first half of the draft likewise refers readers to an endnote after the first few words: note 606, which cross-references the earlier pages and notes. At the end of the first half there’s another italicized parenthetical: Continuation of the text on page 86. Finally, in the Translator’s Preface, on p. xiv, I highlight the fact that this draft was published in this sequence as one of the idiosyncrasies of a faithful transcription of Kafka’s handwritten diaries. The necessity of keeping to the sequence of the notebooks arose from Kafka’s occasional habit of grabbing an older notebook that happened to be at hand to continue his diary writing in its remaining blank pages, sometimes from the back, without dating every entry.