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Scott Spires's avatar

Fun stuff. I love "Barton Fink," but I take its literary portraits/caricatures (of both Odets and Wm. Faulkner) with a grain of salt. As for a Kafka film, there is Stephen Soderbergh's "Kafka," which I didn't much like, but which is legitimately a film about the person Franz Kafka.

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Joshua Corey's avatar

Faulkner is so much better known that John Mahoney’s inspired travesty of him seems far less likely to affect our cultural memory than Turturro’s pompous, terrified Fink—which does, I think, capture some of his original’s seesaw between grandiosity and abjection.

Never saw Soderbergh’s Kafka because I was given to understand it wasn’t very good. But even bad Soderbergh is interesting so I’ll have to give it a try. Jeremy Irons seems woefully miscast, though.

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Alan Horn's avatar

This is excellent. That Odets biography is a great find, and this is a truly imaginative and insightful use of it. Let me point out a typo you’ll want to fix: point B under Proust begins “Kafka’s search for artistic form”

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Joshua Corey's avatar

Thanks, Alan! Typo fixed.

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Cryn Johannsen's avatar

Wow - I'm eager to read your novel when it's published. This post was what I needed today. Thanks.

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