L’avvoltoio

Kafka’s most indisputable quality was his capacity to invent intolerable situations. He needs only a few lines to create a perennial impression. Elaboration, in Kafka, is less admirable than invention. There is only but one man in his work: the Homo domesticus, yearning for a place, even a very humble place, in any Order of the universe, in a ministry, in an asylum, in prison. The subject and the setting are what is essential; not the evolutions of the fable nor the psychological introspection, this is what determines the primacy of his short stories over his novels. Franz Kafka inaugurated a famous species of this genre, whose unforgettable pages where the incredible lies in the behaviour of the characters rather than in the facts.