A Cage Went in Search of a Bird — the meaning of Kafkaesque in today’s world

Among the most Kafkaesque of cages might be that entailed by the term “Kafkaesque” itself. Lured by Kafka’s prescient and temptingly unfinished oeuvre, many talented writers have grappled with his ghost. The best of these tributes, such as Philip Roth’s essay “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”, take the cage as a starting point for the open sky. The least successful find themselves confined by it. 

The 10 short stories in this collection, published to mark the centenary of Kafka’s death, approach the challenge from a refreshing range of angles. Some writers, such as Tommy Orange and Naomi Alderman, contribute pieces in a style recognisably their own but with a Kafkaesque spin. Others, such as Elif Batuman and Charlie Kaufman, opt for something closer to pastiche. The forms are equally, sometimes vertiginously, varied: the stories shift from first-person narrative to a play about punctuation marks, and an artificial intelligence parable that restages the Tower of Babel among machines.

Though written independently, the stories tend to circle around the same topics. The absurdism of the housing market is taken up by a third of the pieces, of which “The Board”, Batuman’s surrealist escapade about a first-time buyer viewing a dismal basement flat in a hostile city, is the most successful. Her cerebral humour is in its element here: estate agent jargon is worked into the texture of the piece — “we were in a moderately sized studio, with Bosch appliances and an exposed brick wall” — while the omnipotent building board operates literally above the heads of the residents. 

In her introduction, critic Becca Rothfeld comments that the stories are haunted by Kafka’s images of imprisonment, but they are also full of characters with no place to be. Ali Smith’s “Art Hotel”, an opaque tale of a family pursued by a sinister red outline that cuts them off from their house and camper van, compounds these two tendencies into a tale of indefinite escape. Like some of Kafka’s own stories, Smith’s hovers between the unexplained and the inexplicable. 

Despite his menacing reputation, Kafka found his writing so funny that he would pause to laugh when reading it aloud. Some writers respond especially well to these darkly comic elements of his writing. Joshua Cohen’s “Return to the Museum” is told from the perspective of a model Neanderthal watching a climate protest unfold from his museum display case. A similar absurdist streak characterises Leone Ross’s “Headache”, where the protagonist’s orgasm-triggered migraines land her in a nightmare sequence of bewildering medical tests. 

Yet one quality of Kafka’s work consistently eludes these pieces. The stories endure because of their untimeliness; both before their time, anticipating everything from Soviet bureaucracy to the Covid-19 pandemic, but also out of time, extracting the universal from the specific. Sometimes these stories give a taste of that enigmatic compound, as in Ross’s eerie image of a doctor’s “peeled face glimmer[ing] like a white boiled egg”. More often, they snag on details: Bosch appliances, a Tesco car park, hospital waiting lists.

Perhaps that is where this collection’s tribute to Kafka really lies. Readers will turn back to the original stories with a sense of how strongly they still stand alone. One hundred years on, it is still Kafka’s world we are living in. 

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories by Ali Smith and others Abacus £18.99, 256 pages

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