Lonely migrant’s experience

Franz Kafka never visited America, but his first novel was about this faraway country. The writer was fumbling for his own style, grotesquely and half-fantastically depicting an individual’s ordeal amidst a strange environment. The location there still refers to some more or less definite geographical realities, and the hero, Karl Rosman, has not yet turned into the mysterious K. of The Process and The Castle.

However, it would be a mistake to see this novel as a mere test of the pen produced by a budding author. The reading of The Missing Person, first published in Ukrainian, is absolutely convincing of this. The translator Yurko Prokhasko and Krytyka publishers, who presented the book at the Kyiv bookstore Ye, are likewise convinced of the correctness of their choice.

Andrii Mokrousov noted three key aspects of the novel: the presence of parody of the classic “novel of upbringing,” a mixture of real and surreal, and its fragmentation and incompleteness. However, this last aspect almost does not stop the perception: only closer to the end of the text, the breaches in the plot begin to tell.

As to the “upbringing,” here it is severe and very seldom reminds of comicalness, so typically found in parodies. Karl Rosman is a very young boy, and everyone around makes use of his naivety. So the “object of upbringing” in Kafka is not so much an active agent, who cognizes the world, as rather a passive object of the others’ actions.

This powerlessness, which accompanies Rosman since his very first days in America, until almost the end of the book fails to develop into the ability to gain independence in life. Due to this, a large part of The Missing Person is very hard to read, because, as you move further in the book, you encounter more and more severe trials for such a likeable hero.

In Rosman, one can look for analogies with the biographical Kafka himself, and see in him a symbol of the ordeal that a modern person who is lost in the world has to go through. But there is also another important aspect, connected to the America the writer never happened to see. At the beginning of the last century, when the book was written, the dynamic United States attracted millions of migrants from Europe. Rosman unintentionally became one of them, and his experience is a kind of debunking of the myth of inevitable success in the New World.

Using the stock stereotype, and making it even more hypertrophic, Kafka depicts the America of giant bridges, hotels, stadiums, theaters, etc., where myriads of petty clerks work. Above them, there is a ruthless bureaucratic machine, which later was so vividly shown in the writer’s further novels.

The presentation of this world suggests surreality and fantasy – and yet Kafka succeeded in grasping the grain of truth, focusing on numerous tendencies of the mass society of today. Rosman is constantly suffering at the hands of this world, becoming the personification of a lonely migrant’s generalized experience, a man of no consequence, and often at odds with this world. Being Jewish, Kafka did not even need to leave Prague to go through similar experience.

We are used to perceiving Kafka with excessive tragicalness and pessimism. Normally, he does not appear as a comic author, but in The Missing Person, despite the general grim tone, one can find both bright and funny moments. Closer to the final, there is even a glimpse of hope – and who knows, maybe the author was going to conclude the novel with a happy ending?

In any case, the book is worth reading – not only because of the author’s severe description of the hero’s ordeal, but also because of Rosman’s naive and dogged hopes for the better. Eventually, it’s worth reading for the sake of a great translation by Prokhasko, who managed to organically and easily render the author’s style, as always, generously using his own rich vocabulary.

As to the publishers, they not only did an excellent job of publishing the book, but also offered two versions of the edition, hard cover and paperback.