Friday short fiction #13: Kafkaesque 2

Alex Brown  Digs  2009
Nadine Gordimer, 'Gregor Revisited'  (THE GUARDIAN, 4 DECEMBER 2004)
Nadine Gordimer is visited by an existential cockroach of her own making. From her 2007 collection Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black.

Cody R. Hobbs, 'The Red Light'  (BOOKSIE.COM, 12 SEPTEMBER 2007)
A guy sits in his car, endlessly waiting for the traffic lights to change. Interestingly Kafka-lite in its sense of staring into an existential abyss, although I'd certainly have liked a punchier ending.

Franz Kafka, 'The Judgement'  (ARKADIA, 1913)
Kafka was unusually taken with this story which poured out in one sitting sometime in 1912, and it's recognised as the turning-point with which Kafka 'became' Kafka. About a man who awakens unimagined resentments in his ageing and disturbed father, for the most part it reads beautifully with very little angst on show. However there are sexual connotations to the bizarre and melodramatic ending that are not completely opaque, yet a little more obvious when read in the original German in which Kafka employed several words freighted with ambiguous meanings that become entirely lost in translation.

Favourite short story of the week: Fredric Brown, 'Knock'  (THRILLING WONDER STORIES, DECEMBER 1948)
Brown's famous one-sentence short story is contained within a longer one, and it's written in such a way that you can still detect the scaffolding that shapes it which is actually necessary for the idea to work. Once again Brown provided a very neat ending so I shall have to dig out that unread NESFA collection I have somewhere to find out if all his shorts are so well crafted.