Man’s Best Friend

For Jonathan Lethem, Franz Kafka “is the paradigmatic example of a writer we read, even devour, and return to with joy, yet still hunger to see interpreted by others. And luckily…Kafka is one of the most interpreted, annotated, and biographed writers, or possibly even humans, who ever came down the pike.” One such interpretation comes in the form of Aaron Schuster’s How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, which Lethem writes about for the latest issue of The Nation. “A terrifically erudite and accessible ramble through Kafka, Lacan, Freud, and Beckett, among others, the book,” Lethem argues, “may also persuade you, as it did me, that ‘Investigations of a Dog’—which was written near the end of Kafka’s life, just as he was abandoning The Castle, and is a somewhat sidelined text (Walter Benjamin admitted that it baffled him)—is as rewarding an object of devotion as anything Kafka ever wrote.” Just like The Castle and The Trial, Lethem finds, it tells the story of a being whose life “is distorted by the presence of an omnipresent and gnomic form of power”—here, that of humans. Read “Franz Kafka’s Best Friend”

Who Did What?

Luca Guadagnino’s films have always petitioned viewers to turn off their brains when it comes to love and sex. He wants them to stop being so smart and brainy about acts of desire. In Call Me by Your Name, we follow a steamy summer romance. In Challengers, we are introduced to a love triangle that leads to competition on and off the tennis courts, and in Queer. we track the messy entanglements of what,Guadagnino,calls “unsynchronized love.” After the Hunt gives us a thornier and necessarily more cerebral story: a whodunit set on a college campus. Reviewing the film for Books & the Arts, Lovia Gyarkye writes that this leads to a confusing set of imperatives: The film tells us to stop thinking even while it is itself full of witty ripostes and zingers. This leads to a psychological thriller that slows down even as it tries to speed up. “While After the Hunt is occasionally gripping,” notes Gyarkye, “it’s more often a plodding film that abandons any promise of real, complex insights in order to chase the fleeting highs of unsatisfying provocation.” Read “The Messy Campus Thriller of “After the Hunt””