Salon.com > Rodger Jacobs http://www.salon.com Thu, 23 May 2013 01:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Did Kafka invent noir? http://www.salon.com/2013/01/21/did_kafka_invent_noir/ http://www.salon.com/2013/01/21/did_kafka_invent_noir/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=13177287 Los Angeles Review of Books DESPITE THE CRITICAL SUPERLATIVES heaped upon Marek Krajewski’s Death in Breslau, the first of the Polish author’s Inspector Eberhard Mock Investigations series released in the U.S., the novel fails to ignite fully as a thriller.

But Krajewski more than compensates for the flaws of his plot and characterization by reminding us of the seminal role that Franz Kafka played in the development of noir — a genre that transcends the clichés of wisecracking private dicks and desperate grifters clawing out of the West Texas oil fields.

Death in Breslau is a prime example of intertextuality, an intricate pastiche that invests the setting of arbitrary tyranny, perversion, and mind-numbing violence that was Nazi Germany with a thoroughly Kafkaesque manner and mood. Indeed, Breslau owes a greater debt to Orson Welles’s 1962 film noir treatment of Kafka’s The Trial than to the hardboiled style of Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

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