Jay Cantor

The four interrelated stories in "Forgiving the Angel" all center around people who Franz Kafka loved and their fate and the fates of the people around them in Stalin's Gulag and Hitler's concentration camps. The first story is about Kafka's dying and Max Brod's famous dilemma about how to handle Kafka's dying wish that all of his unpublished work be destroyed. The second is a fragment of a story Kafka is supposed to have written. The third is the longest in the book, more of a novella of its own, about Kafka's widow's remarrying a German communist, the daughter they have, and his inability to compete with the presence of the ghost/god of Kafka in both women's lives even as he is sent to the Gulag and eventually returns. The final story takes place in the concentration camp where Kafka's translator/chaste lover Milena has been sent and describes a love affair she has amidst the horror, with once again Kafka looming right over the surface.

The stories themselves draw some of their style and mannerism from Kafka, like the accretion of small details, but unlike Kafka they are much more rooted in a very real and painful world--and also have more love and sentiment. Overall the effect is one of a circle of friends that surround Kafka for decades after his death and keep him alive in their worlds and their memories.

At times I found the book absorbing, but it was not uniformly so and parts of it felt unnecessarily obscure, at least to me. But overall would recommend it.… (more)

My first exposure to Kafka's writing was in a class on the uncanny in Spring 2012. One of the stories assigned to us was The Metamorphosis and, as you can imagine (or perhaps have experienced), I was understandably both confused and perturbed at the same time. As I read that story, and the others assigned in that class, I couldn't help but wonder about the author. What would it be like to live in his head, to experience the ideas and then follow through into writing them down. But, like all busy college students, I had neither the time nor the inclination to scout out more information and so that story faded away into a memory that, every now and then, emerges when I see Kafka's name. Jay Cantor took that idea further and, in Forgiving the Angel, he explores Kafka not from inside of Kafka's head, but rather through the relationships formed around him.

Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on Jan 6, 2014.… (more)

"Krazy Kat" was one of the best comic strips ever, and a personal favorite of mine. That doesn't mean a novel based on the strip would work, although this effort by Jay Cantor certainly makes an honest try at it, beginning the action in 1945 as Ignatz escorts Krazy to witness some strange goings-on at Alamogordo in the Arizona desert. Krazy, demoralized by the existence of such diabolical bombs as she has seen being tested, refuses to work anymore. Ignatz goes to all ends to try to help his co-star resolve her depression, and eventually all is as it should be, as Ignatz, Krazy and Offisa Pupp finally resolve the eternal comic strip triangle that has been their blessing and bane for so long. Weird stuff, not quite successfully carried off.… (more)