Bernard Lortholary Books

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

The Castle by Franz Kafka, published after his death, is an enigmatic tale where, among other themes, he explores the relation between power and the individual. The setting is a remote village, covered in snow almost perennially, dominated by a castle that is inaccessible and occupied by dictatorial, self-serving bureaucrats. The story follows a land surveyor, K., through his baffling struggle in contacting his employer, and the consequent encounters in a village whose inhabitants readily submit to an authority that may only exist in their collective imagination.

A mesmeric collection of stories about love. In his characteristically unsentimental, elegant and spare prose, Schlink unveils characters and relationships haunted by betrayal and guilt, in situations where self-examination is inescapable. FLIGHTS OF LOVE consists of seven stories, all of them weaving around the idea of love - why people are drawn to it and why some run away. Schlink shows us, in turn, love as desire, love as confusion, love as a quick affair, love as a drastic life-changing rebellion, love as a force of habit, love as self-betrayal. The cumulative effect is a book which uses effortlessly beguiling language to examine the universal human desire to find a lasting loving relationship, however thwarted that desire ultimately is.

Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as he slowly makes his way into the interior of the great continent. Kafka's first novel (begun in 1911 and never finished) is infused with a quite un-Kafkaesque blitheness and sunniness, brought to life in this lyrical translation that returns to the original manuscript of the book.

La contrebasse est l'instrument le plus gros, le plus puissant et le plus indispensable de l'orchestre, le plus beau aussi, dit d'abord le contrebassiste. Mais bientôt l'éloge pompeux laisse affleurer les frustrations et les rancoeurs du musicien et de l'homme. Et peu à peu la haine d'abord refoulée de cette encombrante compagne s'exprime, se déchaîne et explose jusqu'à la folie... Ce monologue tragique et drôle, par l'auteur du best-seller Le Parfum, tient l'affiche en Allemagne depuis des années. Interprété à Paris par Jacques Villeret, il a reçu un accueil triomphal.

Film tie-in edition of Bernhard Schlink's exceptionally powerful novel - 'A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience' [Independent on Saturday]