Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

by Broyard, Anatole
ISBN: 9780679781264
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Overview

What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost bohemia.

We see Broyard setting up his used bookstore on Cornelia Street--indulging in a dream that was for him as romantic as "living off the land or sailing around the world" while exercizing his libido with a protegee of Anais Nin and taking courses at the New School, where he deliberates on "the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis." Along the way he encounters Delmore Schwartz, Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, William Gaddis, and other writers at the start of their careers. Written with insight and mercurial wit, Kafka Was the Rage elegantly captures a moment and place and pays homage to a lost bohemia as it was experienced by a young writer eager to find not only his voice but also his place in a very special part of the world.

  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Broyard, Anatole
  • ISBN: 9780679781264
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.02 x 0.43
  • Number Of Pages: 160
  • Publication Year: 1997

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  • The fifties gestating the sixties

    Would Recommend
    steve s. - 6 months ago

    Broyard seemed to know everyone in GV--This memoir, which seems to be posthumous, and that gives it some poignancy, really captures the young writer among the artists and the eccentrics in the postwar boom of the fifties--The sexual politics now seem strange--The fifties always seem so innocent (innocent of the future) and looking back on them with Broyard offers a unique POV on the time--Of course it was gestating the oncoming decade of the sixties!