Locking down with Kafka
Locking down with Kafka How the great writer, in his airless, claustrophobic fictions, provides a guide to living in the pandemic age. In “A Report to an Academy”, a short story published by Franz Kafka in 1919, an ape named Red Peter gives a lecture to a scientific conference, recalling how he was hunted in the jungle and then awoke one day in a cage, unable to return to the old way of life he had loved. “For the first time in my life I could see no way out,” the ape says of his captivity. “Hopelessly sobbing, painfully hunting for fleas, apathetically licking a coconut, bea...