Roberto Calasso - K.

An inexplicable, irrepressible cheerfulness runs through the pages of The Missing Person . The reason for it remains unclear. After his initial stroke of luck in meeting Edward Jakob, the proverbial “American uncle,” Karl Rossmann’s path becomes ever more harrowing. Every step entails some ordeal and seems to lead toward progressive degradation. But Karl has the gift of the great mystics he knows nothing about: he accepts everything that happens to him in the same spirit. He can tell when someone is hostile to him and can stand up for himself when threatened. But he never grows bitter. Karl focuses on one thing: whatever it is he must do, he wants to do it well . Even in the most discouraging situations he manages to tell himself: “It’s just a matter of understanding the mechanism.” He uses the dozens of compartments in the prodigious writing desk that his uncle procured for him with the same care and precision that he will employ in composing, from an array of half-eaten scraps, a presentable breakfast tray for the obese Brunelda.

Kafka in The Missing Person experimented with something that wasn’t congenial to his epoch: epic naïveté. And even for him it was an isolated attempt. His trick in approaching that naïveté was to take a character who wholly embodies it and put him in a place still capable of harboring it: America, as seen through the astonished eyes of a European adolescent at the beginning of the century. On the basis of having read only “The Stoker,” not knowing that it formed the first chapter of a novel, Musil got the point: “It is an intentional naïveté, but it lacks any of naïveté’s unpleasantness. Because it is genuine naïveté, which in literature (exactly like the false kind; that’s not where the difference lies!) is something indirect, complicated, and earned; a longing, an ideal.” Soon thereafter we find the loveliest words ever written about The Missing Person: the novel, Musil says, is sustained by “that feeling of children’s fervent prayers, and it has something of the restless care of well-done homework.”

The air that circulates through The Missing Person is pure adventure-novel air. It’s not that Karl Rossmann’s experiences are so astonishing but rather that the cast of his mind is such that the world appears to him with a strange sharpness of outline. People and objects both. It’s as if Karl were bringing as his gift to America that hyper-real vision that only the objective lens allows us. Stashed in his emigrant’s suitcase: the hallucination of cinema.

The passengers of a European ship are disembarking in New York. A young German realizes he has forgotten his umbrella and goes back to look for it, entrusting his suitcase to a casual acquaintance. Utterly banal, one of those scenes that a novelist — even Dickens, who is Kafka’s model here — devises in order to hasten toward some narrative juncture. But not this time. As soon as Karl turns around and goes back to look for his umbrella, the reader begins to experience an unusual phenomenon: that of sinking into detail. Every little thing suddenly takes on great importance. It stands out in relief, too much relief. Four lines later, when Karl Rossmann finds himself “forced to make his way through countless little spaces, continually curving passageways, short flights of stairs that followed one after the other, and an empty room with an abandoned desk,” we’re already obscurely aware that we’re no longer merely aboard a ship, but in a new land too, where everything is subject to heightened scrutiny and the observing eye feels obliged to fix on every gesture, every step, every feature of the characters. Everything expands; each fragment takes up the entire visual field. An unreasonable tension builds. For a while we wonder why, as if that tension is preparing us for some extraordinary event. But then we forget all that, satisfied by what is already happening. If a hulking German stoker, whose name we don’t even know, complains about injustices suffered at the hands of his boss, Schubal, who seems to prefer foreigners to Germans, and if Karl Rossmann, who has just met him, wants to help him make his case, this captures our interest, as if we were witnessing some divine judgment. And we’re not done sinking into detail yet. As the stoker and Karl Rossmann are presenting themselves to the captain, majestic ships, their flags blowing in the wind, cross paths beyond the room’s three windows — and jutting up behind them: New York. Is this perhaps the first time Karl sees the city? No, it is rather the first time Karl is seen: New York “stared at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers.” Thousands and thousands of eyes converge upon a single figure; they will accompany Karl through his ups and downs, never looking away. This gaze is one reason that every event he’s involved in is so tense and phantasmal, without Karl’s realizing it. A vast, anonymous audience is watching him. It’s the birth of the cinema. But the positions are reversed: this time the audience is up high, toward the sky, and fully lit.

Kafka wanted to portray an “ultra-modern New York.” Great was his disappointment when the first copy of “The Stoker” arrived. On Werfel’s advice, Kurt Wolff had, for the cover image, used an etching of New York Harbor in 1840. A steamer with a tall smokestack, a few sails in the distance, the vague outline of a city in the background. A charming genre scene — but how remote from what the author had intended. No trace, in that strip of low, distant houses, of the watching eyes. Kafka hid his disappointment among expressions of gratitude. He concluded, in mandarin style, by telling Wolff that it was just as well that he hadn’t been shown the cover in advance, since he would have refused it — and in so doing would have “lost that lovely image.”

From the first pages of The Missing Person , the words fall into their rows, always with the same weight, as evenly spaced as lines in a school notebook. This evenness remains characteristic of The Trial and The Castle , even as they advance into murkier, more abstract territories. Everything is related in the manner of Karl Rossmann’s journey through the ship in search of his umbrella. The surface is unfailingly compact, the density constant. Each word demands attention. The precise description of a gesture, a remark about the weather, and a digression on the law are placed on the same level and lead smoothly one into the other. Nothing is glaringly important, nothing is insignificant. Perhaps no other novelist has given readers this calm certainty, such as runners have when they feel the clay track, always uniformly firm and yielding, beneath their feet.

When Kafka was writing The Missing Person , the pervasive, sooty air of the big city, already encountered in Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, hadn’t yet penetrated the German novel. Now, as soon as Kafka begins to describe New York, the scene stands out with the clarity of the first time —and of the panels of Little Nemo, still wet with Winsor McCay’s colors, which Kafka had never seen.

The Missing Person is extraordinarily visual. In The Trial and The Castle , everything unfolds first of all within an individual’s psyche, and images interpose themselves from time to time, beating their bat wings against the flow of thought. But here they cover, from one corner to the other, a vast external surface, over which Karl Rossmann must travel with his gaze. And so he does, like a good schoolboy. So when certain figures — his uncle, the head cook, Klara Pollunder, or Brunelda — suddenly acquire names and stories of their own, it’s as if they have come to life and taken temporary leave from their stations on that surface. But their mute, cutout shapes remain. And someday they’ll return to lie back down in them, as if into the still-warm depression of a bed.