Muir combines vivid descriptions of people and scenes with passionate discussions of socialism, unemployment, and the spiritual poverty of the Scottish people in the 30's. Truly a political poet's book

In his protagonist, Richard Hieck, Broch has presented us with a companion to Robert Musil's Ulrich: both are men influenced by the unsettling theories of their time and both search for meaning within the maddening cacaphony of ideas, but where Ulrich is swallowed by the din Broch presents us with an intriguing resolution to the problems of disorder. Hieck is a mathematician, an astronomer, a scientist - he is a lonely man who pursues knowledge down all of its blind alleys and dead ends purely for the sake of the pursuit, certain that there is no end, no ultimate goal. All of his relationships with the world are kept at an uneasy distance; from his half-demented mentor Doctor Weitprecht, his saintly younger sister Susanne (whose own response to the chaos of her times is to become a true "Bride of Christ"), his bohemian artist brother Otto - all are as equally inscrutable to Richard as are the millions of stars which pattern the night sky. And throughout his quest he remains haunted by the memory of his father, himself a scientist who succombed to the madness of the universe; it would seem that Richard is doomed to an obscure life and unrepented death. Can he be saved?
I mention the comparison to Robert Musil's masterpiece, "The Man Without Qualities" not only because it bears a relation to Broch's work but also because the respective authors seemed to have know of their connection. No less an authority that Elias Canetti - who knew both men - explains the animosity between the two thusly: Musil believed Broch to be an amateurish writer and was suspicious that Broch could claim to have "solved" the ideas presented in his works so quickly ("The Unknown Quantity" was written in six months while Musil's own opus went unfinished after a lifetime of work). Broch believed Musil a "king of a paper empire" whose life's work mirrored the chaotic unfathomability of the time. This writer's spat aside, I think that it illustrates Broch's conclusion, perhaps his "solution" to the Unknown Quantity.
Broch suggests that the missing element in the equation of Richard Hieck's life is simply love: "an awkward kiss released from all willing, released from Being, upborne by a wave of darkness." p.132 When Hieck accepts that there are no answers to be discerned from the infinity of stars above, when he allows himself to recognize the beauty that is next to him in the person of the devoted Ilse Nydhalm, when he understands that he cannot make himself desireless - only then is Richard Hieck saved from the world of pure knowledge. "[I]n the lonliness of the heart everything is absolute, in the heart there are no statistically approximate values, there the law is valid, and that is all that there is to say." p.176 The Unknown Quantity is elusive for Richard, but it is also his salvation.
I recommend this novel as a fine introduction to Hermann Broch, who is at his most accesible in this, his fourth work (published in 1933). It presents many of the same themes which dominate Broch's works, from his "Sleepwalkers" trilogy down to "The Guiltless." A challenging writer and a satisfying read.

I know Kafka was not American. I know that he wasn't even British and that he didn't speak English. He was Czech. He wrote in German. But "AMERICA" is spelled with a "C". I can't fault Kaca for this mistake. But his editors should have noticed it, I think.

"Amerika" is the German spelling of America, and likewise, Kafka wrote in German. It is not a misspelling, nor an oversight.

It amazes me how Kafka has caught the American spirit so well. Since the end of World War II, Ameirican culture has become increasng hedonistic at the expense of other nations and even our own poor. But that spirit is reflected especially so in the 1990's where we seem to have forgotten what it means to look out for one another, and have lost the meaning of true hospitality and human empathy. Perhaps, Tom Brokaw in his new book, The Greatest Generation, is right; not since our grandparents has the nation cared for it's own in such an unselfish manner. That sense of caring seems to have been lost to us today.

I wrote the first review here of _The Sleepwalkers_.

Since a subsequent reviewer has mentioned Broch's "political activities", perhaps it is relevant here to quote something his son (H.F. Broch de Rothermann) told me: "There are many persons who could have done for the United Nations what my father did, but there is no one who can write the novels which for that reason [i.e., because Broch spent his time and energy on the UN instead of writing...] went unwritten."

It is a paradox that two of the most boldly innovative novels of the 20th century were written by a man who regarded literature as a poor substitute for philosophy. Hermann Broch undertook ''The Death of Virgil'', a fictional vision rivaled only by ''Finnegans Wake,'' because the radio station that commissioned him in the mid-30's to address the problem of literature at the end of a cultureal epoch insisted on a story rather than a lecture. When his narrative led him, like his hero Virgil, to the conclusion that poetry is immoral in an age of decline, Broch rejected literature and devoted himself until his death in 1951 to the study of mass psychology and politics.

''The Sleepwalkers'' is a thesis novel with a vengeance. According to Broch, sleepwalkers are people living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems, just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and walking. The trilogy portrays three representative cases of ''loneliness of the I'' stemming from the collapse of any sustaining system of values. ''The Romantic,'' a subtle parody of 19th-century realism, takes place in Berlin in 1888 and focuses on the Purssian landed gentry. Joachim von Pasenow is a romantic because he clings desperately to values that others regard as outmoded, and this ''emotional lethargy'' lends his personality a certain quaint courtliness but renders him unfit to deal with situations that do not fit into his narrow Junker code, such as his love affiar with a passionate lower-class young woman. ''The Anarchist'' moves west to Cologne and Mannheim in 1903 and shifts to the urban working class. The accountant August Esch, who lives by the motto ''business is business,'' seeks an escape into eroticism when he realizes that double-entry bookkeeping cannot balance the ethical debits and credits in the turbulent society of prewar Germany.

A plot summary does justice neither to the narrative power of ''The Sleepwalkers'' nor to its experimental origniality. Hoping to achieve what he called ''polyhistorical totality,'' Broch included, after the manner of Dos Passos, a number of parallel plots involving characters who exemplify the theme of existential loneliness - the esthete Eduard von Bertrand, a shadowy figure on whom the others project their hopes and fears; the shellshocked sholdier Godicke, who must reassemble his personality in The veterans' hosptial; the architect Jaretzki, who loses an arm in the war and with it, symbolically, his sense of proporation; the alienated young wife Hannah Wendling; the orphan Marguerite; and others. And the three parts are unified through a complex set of images involving uniforms (security) and the Statue of Liberty (freedom), a small reproduction of which Esch dreams over.

BUT multiplicity of narratives was not enough for Broch. He wanted to demonstrate that rationalism and irrationalism are also among the fragments that litter the psychic landscape when ethical unity falls apart. To represent these poles, he incorporated into the lengthy third part 16 chapters that sometimes rise to pure lyric poetry and 10 chapters of an essay titled ''Disintegration of Values.'' While the essay expounds the philosophical theory underlying the novel, the ''ballad'' tells a story seemingly unrelated to them main narrative - the love of a Salvation Army girl in Berlin and the Jew Nuchem is doomed by irreconcilable differences in religion. We come to realize that the narrator of the ballad, Dr. Bertrand Muller, is also the author of ''Disintegration of Values.'' Since the essay embraces the various plots, he is by extension the author of the entire novel. Through this series of encapsulations, Broch sought to create an ''absolute'' novel that, as in Einstein's theory of relativity, contained its own observer within the filed of observation.

This is a classic that enlarged the scope of 20th-century fiction by focusing with unparalleled precision on the profound transformation of values that produced the modern consciousness...

Broch's Trilogy is the chronicle of the evolution of Germany in particular and the whole Europe in general between the years 1888 and 1918. The philosophical focus of the trilogy should be searched for in the third novel, Huguenau or the Realist and within that in the essay 'Disintegration of Values", which is allegedly written by a Bertrand Mueller, who according to Broch himself is the same Bertrand who appears in the first two novels of the trilogy. The essay on disintegration of values closely follows Max Weber's Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. In fact not before we understand Weber's theory of modernity and the role of the protestant reformation in the rise of modern Capitalism can we appreciate the full vigor of Broch's narrative. In ten separate parts, Broch explains masterfully the notion of style of an age, the relation of plastic arts with the the style, the concept of inner logic within each indididual value-system and the effect of it on the life of the individual. The third part of the novel, the realist, is the culmination of the trilogy as such. It is where all the characters meet and it is there that Broch uses all different narrative modes. A certain air of inevitablity is prevalent in Broch's narrative of the disintegration of values, which, in turn, appears to follow a certain Hegelian Historicism. This third novel of the trilogy consists of five separate parts, three of which are stories taking place in a German city near the Belgian borders and the other two are the story of the Salvation Army Girl in Berlin, which is Bertrand Mueller's journal and then his essay on the disintegration of values. It is Broch's wonderful technique to combine all five narratives as one by integrating the story of Huguenau in the essay, as though Mueller, omnisciently and from afar comments on the life of the people in this small and remote town. Bertrand Muellr, therefore, is Broch's own alter ego. He, along with Broch, is the author of Disintegration of Values. Reading The Sleepwalkers with patience is a joy. Loiter around every page, every line, every word, read them again and again and let them shine their light upon your eyes.

When I first read this book 4 years ago, I thought it was the best book I have ever read. It had intrigued me like no other book. As a current freshman in college, I have read many books since (including Kafka's other classics The Castle and Amerika) and still, no book can capture me the way Kafka has in the Trial. The story of Joseph K. is a story for the ages. The complete confusion and naivety in Joseph K.'s life as well as his futile attempts to understand it pull the reader in and makes us look at things from his point of view. It is this ability that I love so much in Kafka. I have read The Trial many times, and each time I am just as entwined in the the confusion and suffering as the first time. A must read for any Kafka lover or any lover of literature for that matter. B.Nichols

If you are into existencialism or if you are worried about the meaning of your subjective life and the absurdity of the workings of modern society, this is a book you must read. Or maybe, if you read this though provoking masterpiece, you will start to think seriously about these issues and other aspects of the individual, and its daily relationship with society, bureaucracy and power.
This book was published poshumously in 1925 (Kafka died in 1924), and is considered by many philosophers and critics the best that he wrote.
The description of solitude and of the alienation of the modern human being is at the core of all Kafka's opus. We could consider that K. anticipated some recurrent themes of the existencialists. His detailed and realistic description of the human individual existence reveals its absurdity and irreality. From a metaphysical perspective, the absurd is based on the absence of God and the impossibility to understand anything that goes beyond rationality. From the social standpoint, it stems from the suffocating or controlling character of modern society. Struck by these complexities, the individual can only seek refuge in his small personal reality, renouncing reassuring answers and certainties.

I had read a lot of Kafka's short stories, but THE TRIAL was the first of his books I tackled. I just recently finished it, and I've been laying awake at night contemplating it ever since. If there's supposed to be any deep philosophical meaning to the book, I guess I just don't see it. I think Kafka writes about his own life and feelings in a symbolic way, and that's what the novel really is, a metaphor.
The novel starts out slow, the first hundred pages are kind of boring. But when the story's protagonist, K., starts really learning about the court he must fight his legal battle against, the novel gets intense. Of course, the more K. (and the reader) learn about the case, the more hopeless it seems.
THE TRIAL is like "1984" with the strangeness of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The court K. must face is supreme and untouchable, and the only way to avoid condemnation is to stay on the good side of the perverse, unjust, yet powerful judges. If you're able to put yourself in K.'s position while reading this book, you'll find it extremely frightening.
This book gets five stars because of how well it creates an engaging world where there is no hope of salvation, and that's the most terrifying thing ever.

I would not buy this book if it were your first forray into the realm of Kafka. But the short stories first, then Amerika, then the trial, and then, if you could make it through the trial, try this read.

The new translation is excellent (I've read both translations) and puts an even grimmer spin on life in the village of the castle.

Please note: Kafka died before finishing the book and he never really prepared it for publication. There are sentences that run half a page, and paragaphs that run almost a whole chapter. The final page ends mid sentence.

If you are a fan of Kafka then this book is a must read, especially if you read the Muir translation of The Castle.

The Castle is a powerful look at a town full of people trying to gain meaning for their lives from something outside of and wholy removed from their selves. The townspeoples alienation from each other and needy grasping toward a Castle that they can dream about but never touch is a disturbing one with strong parallels in today's celebrity worship, religious fundamentalism, and statism. Similiarly, K.'s descent from activism to conformity illustrates the power of mass society and the desire to fit in over the indivdual's need for a self-contained self.

The problem is the book is tooo long. Kafka induces a sense of futility and alienation by making his story move at a glacial pace with minute changes taking chapters to occur. And while this technique works, it's certainly not some great literary accomplishment.

So while The Castle is a relevant treatise on how we give, or fail to give, meaning to our lives; it's also an incredibly dense and difficult read.

Translation means everything! Over the years I've read much of Kafka especially during adolescence and into my early twenties when his worldview spoke most directly to my own attempts to understand how the world really worked. Of all his books only The Castle totally defeated me. I must have begun it five times in my life, only to abandon it partway through. Now I know why. It wasn't Kafka. It was the translation.

Mark Harmon's translation brought Kafka close to my ear and heart, the way he used to when I was younger. I could see the darkness of his interiors, feel the cold of his snow covered wind blown exteriors, smell the stale beer of the taproom, taste the small meals and strong coffee served, sense the animal []attractions of his characters. Most of all I could really hear the voices of his people as they simultaneously revealed and concealed themselves through their stories.

Sometimes I laughed out loud. Sometimes my hair stood on end at the dark realities which this book unveils. The Barnabas family stories in particular chilled me. Especially in this time of fear and shunning by powerful majorities of the 'others'in our societies and in the exhaustion of the 'cleansings' and genocides of the last century, the fall of that family made me feel like I was inside a hateful part of our past, present and future.

I've now lived part of my life within bureaucratic organizations, even as an 'official' and I understand as I couldn't as a youth how absolutely Kafka has gotten to the deepest truths about how our power structures work. What it's like to be enmeshed as part of them, and-or to be at their mercy. It is hard to find free space in the world.

I used to think Kafka was a genius and an artist of the highest rank. Now, reading him in an excellent translation I understand that he was also a prophet.

This was the first novel by Kafka that I read and I wasn't terribly impressed. However, being his lightest novel it was an easy and entertaining read. Amerika is a tale of Karl Rossman, a recent emmigrant to America from Germany and his mis-adventures. Karl gets himself into many precarious situations which were the only real sources of entertainment in the novel. Otherwise all of Kafka's characters are very simple and none are none of them are devloped to satifaction, not even Karl, whom I would consider emotionally flat. Even when presented with pitfalls that would be devastating to most anyone, Karl reacts with little emotion. All the reader sees of Karl is a young man with good morals and motivation to improve his lot in a new and strange country, but we know nothing of Karl's heart and soul. This makes it difficult to get in tune with Karl and consequently the novel as a whole. Still, when reading Amerika you can sense Kafka's potential and Amerika has motivated me to read his more celebrated works such as The Trial and The castle.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) started writing this novel in 1913 and this, like most of his other work, was published after his death. He never visited America, but reality is not an important factor in his work. Rather, he creates a surreal landscape for his main character, Karl, a 16-year old who has been sent away from his homeland because of an unfortunate relationship with a servant girl. Karl is a victim throughout in a series of improbable adventures, and constantly struggles through a confused labyrinth of streets and buildings and random acts of cruelty and compassion. Always, he is under stress and the choices he makes keep leading to even more preposterous predicaments. I was constantly annoyed with him and yet identified with him as he fumbled through his very uncomfortable life. This is the only Kafka work I've ever read and don't plan on reading any more, even though I can acknowledge his artistry. It's just too disturbing. But I still do recommend this book because it challenged and expanded my perceptions. And I do appreciate the legacy he left to the world.

"Amerika" was the first book by Franz Kafka that I read, and it was definitely a treat.

Poor Karl Rossman, shipped off to America by his parents for having a child with a maid, has his first adventure on the boat in New York's harbor. Helping a stoker who feels he's being treated unfairly, he (Karl) happens to find his Uncle Jacob on the boat. The very Uncle Jacob who was waiting for his arrival!

So it's the cushy life for Karl right? Weeeell, not exactly. It starts out that way but eventually Karl ends up on his own.

"Amerika" has more humor in it than Kafka's other novels and it may have you chuckling and cheering for Karl on his journey. It did me.

What happens to Karl and how exactly does he end up in Oklahoma? You're going to have to read the book to find that out. Oh, and make sure to notice all the "cramped" situations Karl gets stuck in. Very amusing!

Whether you are interested in John Muir specifically or just want to read about an interesting life, this book is an excellent place to start.

John Muir had an incredible and important life, and it is told here succinctly in his own words, excerpted to emphasize the profound. It is a glimpse into a lifestyle 99.9% of us will never know, yet it is truly important to our times. His love of nature, adventure and exploration is a reminder of why we need to experience more than our 9 to 5 workdays and why we need to apply ourselves to the protection of the Earth.

Muir was a gentle but strong man, a genius with simple needs, solitary yet influential. This book is a terrific way to look into his life and his time and to gain some inspiration into our lives and our times.

Admittedly, Kafka is not an easy read. The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony are the two parts of this book I am most familiar with, and I definitely recommend them to interested readers. Both are strangely imaginative stories, sometimes lacking in action, but more than making up for it in depth. I think Kafka's stories are riveting due to the psychological tension he creates, especially in 'Penal Colony'. That particular short story is also an operetta, which I recently saw. To see it acted out is a uniquely disturbing experience. Read on, but brace yourselves.

Said plainly, Kafka was one bizarre man. His Contemplation is not much more than various mental wanderings, but The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony make for wonderful short stories. Curl up and read THIS on your dark and stormy night! These are really delicious stories.

I've looked into other translations, and I wasn't pleased ... this one seems far superior. Joachim Neugroschel goes for the most basic, uncluttered, uncomplicated way of interpreting Kafka. One would think that this would make the text thin and anemic, but it really makes all the greater impact: "One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin." Other translations seem to wander, and find larger, more complicated ways of saying "agitated dreams" or "monstrous vermin." Even though I wish I knew German, I find this English translation of a very high quality.

This is a splendid initiation into the warped imagination of Franz Kafka. In one swoop the reader gets the infamous Freudian "Metamorphosis" as well as some of Kafka's other macabre short stories.

Perhaps the best of these is "In the Penal Colony." It reads like Michel Foucault's "Discipline And Punish" on acid. It is almost like a satire on what Hegel liked to refer to as the "slaughterhouse of history." The story is at once terrifying and grotesquely comical.

The rest of the stories are typical Kafka; perverse but fascinating. For those who have a morose fascination with ghastly world of this author's literary fantasy, this is an exceptional book to begin with.

From the title, one would think this a type of travel journal, a panorama of episodes along the way, a sequence of stations between the starting off point and the destination. Instead, the overall weight of the book is given to glaciers, their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. While Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, never repeating himself though constantly repeating his subject, the sheer repetition tends to bog the work down. Two whole pages might contribute to our view of a particular glacier, and suddenly Muir reports that he's finished a 200-mile leg of his journey on foot. He tells us when he's climbed a glacier, and along the way we've missed an entire week. Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. For nature lovers who will never go to Alaska, the descriptions in this book make the ranges and glaciers come alive in print, but as a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book forms only a vague shadow.

Nature is a beautiful and highly complicated phenomena of this world. Many have sought to understand it and capture its essence in writing. The nature writings of John Muir succeed in capturing the beauty of nature as well as the scientific aspect. I have to be honest, I wasn't that enthused about reading a book about science. I expected Muir's book to be identical to a science textbook, definitely not my idea of enjoyment. However, his book was actually full of detailed descriptions and creative uses of similes, metaphors, and analogies. In fact, it completely changed my perception of a scientific novel.

In his book, "Travels in Alaska", Muir brings alive the magnificence of the vast expanses of unexplored Alaskan territory. His prose reveals his enthusiasm for nature, and he weaves clear and distinct pictures through his words. Muir's writing is very personal. His favorable feelings toward the land are very apparent, and reading the book is like reading his diary or journal. He avoids using scientific jargon that would confuse and frustrate the average reader; his words are easily understood.

Muir also uses very detailed descriptions throughout "Travels in Alaska". Although at times his painstaking description is a plus, at others, he seems to take it a little too far. Numerous times throughout the book, Muir spent a paragraph or two talking about something slightly insignificant. He would go off on a tangent of enthusiasm for something as simple as a sunrise or the rain. While his careful observances make the book enjoyable, the sometimes excessive detail tends to detract from the point he was trying to make. The description also reveals that his heart and soul was in his research; this became very evident upon reading the long and thoughtful descriptions.

"Travels in Alaska" can be appreciated by a wide audience. Muir shines light upon the Alaskan territory, and he is detailed in his account of the many people he meets. Anyone could read the book and find enjoyment learning about Alaska when it was for the most part unsettled. Muir shares with the readers his keen insight upon the various Indian tribes that lived in Alaska. At one point in the book, he gives a very detailed description of one tribe's feasting and dancing. His observances capture exactly what he saw and the feelings these observances evoked in him.

John Muir's writing is of high quality. He incorporates beautiful and creative similes, metaphors, and analogies. His prose is very poetic, which makes it an enjoyable read. For example, Muir says that "when we contemplate the world as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." His work is also very organized. The book is divided into 3 sections, or parts of his trip, as well as separate chapters devoted to specific subjects. Muir spends one chapter describing his trip to Puget Sound, another on Wrangell Island, etc. The book follows a specific format that ensures that everything is easily followed and understood.

Truthfully, I was impressed with the writing, and the fact that it was nothing like a textbook. It incorporated the literary aspect so well, that the book held my interest whereas a textbook would not have. I had the wrong impression of a scientific novel, and I urge anyone unfamiliar with the genre, to give "Travels in Alaska" a fair try. It may just change your mind about scientific writing.

I confess up front, it's been a few years since I read Muir's Travels in Alaska. Yet significant aspects I remember well. Given Muir's exuberance for life and almost everything he encounters in his travels, one almost looses view of Muir the botanist and geologist. But not quite. Here we find the author contemplating the activity of glaciers and documenting the flora of southeast Alaska. Muir (who tended strongly toward vegetarianism) gleefully entertaining himself by foiling duck hunters. Baffling the locals by happily wandering out into major storms.
The book is a journal of Muir's 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips (he wouldn't mind if we called them adventures) to SE Alaska's glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. He died while preparing this volume for publication.
I remind myself, and anyone reading this, that Muir isn't for every reader. And, as other reviewers have stated, this may not be the volume in which to introduce oneself to the one-of-a-kind John Muir. One reviewer doesn't think that Muir is entirely credible in these accounts. I won't say whether or not this is wrong, but I tend to a different view. For some of us -- and certainly for Muir -- wilderness is a medicine, a spiritual tonic, so to speak. For the individual effected in this way, physical impediments and frailties rather dissolve away when he is alone in wildness. I once heard Graham Mackintosh (author of Into a Desert Place) speak of this. In all of his travels alone in the desert, he doesn't recall having ever been sick. This may not sound credible to some, but I strongly suspect it is true.
If you like Muir's writings, read this book. If you like the stuff of Best Sellers, perhaps you should look elsewhere.