Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K....
         (Kafka, The Trial)

In the summer of 1982, a publisher asked Levi to translate The Trial, as Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg had been asked to translate Lord Jim and Madame Bovary. For his mother, he needed the money. While he would have preferred Joseph Conrad or Thomas Mann, he sounded at the time almost cheerful about the project:

I like and admire Kafka because he writes in a manner that is totally foreign to me. In my writings, for better or worse, knowingly or unknowingly, I have always made an effort to move from dark to clear, like a filtration pump that sucks in cloudy water and expels it clarified, if not sterile. Kafka takes an opposite path; he pours out an endless stream of the hallucinations dredged up from levels unbelievably deep, and never filters them. The reader feels them swarming with seeds and spores: they are burning with meaning, but he is never helped to tear down or bypass the veil, so as to see things in the place where they are hidden. Kafka never touches ground, he never deigns to offer you the clue to the maze.

His tune would soon change. In a 1983 interview, this dutiful child of the Enlightenment conceded that Kafka had a gift "that went beyond everyday reason...an almost animalesque sensitivity, like snakes that know when earthquakes are coming." But Levi also wondered "if it is a good idea to give a book like this to a fifteen-year-old.... Now this ending is so cruel, so unexpectedly cruel, that if I had a young child I would spare him. I fear it would disturb him, make him suffer, although of course it is the truth. We will die, each of us will die, more or less like that." This is odd enough from a writer whose feelings had been hurt when his own children declined to discuss his books. But, he confessed, "the undertaking disturbed me badly. I went into a deep, deep depression." And: "I felt assaulted by this book." Disappearing into Joseph K., "I accused myself, as he did."

Levi was well-known for his impatience with long-winded, solipsistic or obscurantist prose. (About Beckett: "It is the duty of every human being to communicate." About Pound: "writing in Chinese simply showed a disrespect for the reader." Borges he found "alien and distant," Proust "boring" and Dostoyevsky "rebarbative" and "portentous.") But this was different. Kafka got to him so much that he resolved never to read him again: "I feel a repulsion that is clearly of a psychoanalytic nature."

How so? Let's look at that strange unfinished novel, written shortly after Franz broke off his engagement to Félice, under the influence of Søren Kierkegaard and the "rebarbative" author of Crime and Punishment, with its attic offices and courts of impeachment, its brittle beards and colored badges, its "ostensible acquittals" and "indefinite postponements," its hopelessness, sinfulness and sinister-enigmatic tropes: "It did not follow that the case was lost, by no means, at least there was no decisive evidence for such an assumption; you simply knew nothing more about the case and would never know anything more about it."

Imagine a Primo Levi meditating on, for instance, this creepy middle passage:

One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the disposition of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery--since everything is interlocked--and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless.

Or, at the end of the novel, this impasse:

Were there arguments in his favor that had been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court, to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.

Easy enough to say that the survivor read himself into such paranoid cloud shapes, where guilt was nameless, justice faceless, space liquid, time centrifugal, God absent and Law a myth--because everybody does. We all feel something ominous and devouring about corporations and bureaucracies, about banking and religion, even about Prague, that baroque estrangement. But a sentence like this one had to seem personal: "Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session." And still more chilling: "The hunting dogs are playing in the courtyard, but the hare will not escape them, no matter how fast it may be flying already through the woods."

Moreover, Franz K.'s Joseph K. is devoured as well by sexuality--by Elsa, the cabaret waitress, who receives visitors in bed; by Leni, the lawyer's servant, who only sleeps with men who have been accused; by Fräulein Bürstner and the usher's wife; by the half-naked mothers nursing babies in the Lower Court, the prostitute maids and prostitute custodians, and the little girls who molest him in the painter Titorelli's garret, behind the red door--never even mind the mother he hasn't seen for three years. Maybe that butcher's knife wasn't intended, after all, for his self-interrogating heart.

Well, Kafka: He was all about failure. Everything was incomprehensible, nothing could be known, and there were no happy endings. (His three sisters all died in the camps.) Kafka told us: "Balzac carried a cane on which was carved the legend: I smash every obstacle; my legend reads: Every obstacle smashes me." And about this Kafka, Levi, "a puritanical introvert," was crystal clear: "I fear him, like a great machine that crashes in on you, like the prophet who tells you the day you will die."

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