This Owl He has more than 30 years in the noble profession of journalism. And my personal policy is not to meet with any type of authority, much less mayors, governors, congressmen, candidates for anything. Unless it is a transcendental fact to report. Or something of vital importance to the country. It suits me better this way. I was born with the written press and the low profile allows me to write about everything without any type of commitment. Of course, every time I can I receive journalism students who come to the newsroom curious and ask about everything.
My first advice to them is to read everything you can. First, classic literature. After all. ‘Put down your cell phone for a while and grab a book.’ Now that they have released the trailer for ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, what better opportunity to read the immense novel by Gabriel García Márquez. It is a wonderful work. I remember that in the fourth year of secondary school at my beloved school Hipólito Unanue they sent me to read ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, born in what is now the Czech Republic (Prague 1883-Kierling, Austria, 1924). I was astonished when I read: ‘One morning Gregorio Samsa woke up transformed into a monstrous insect.’
Until then, I had never read a fantasy story set in the modern world. It was published in 1915, in the middle of the First World War. Nothing would be the same in the literature and thought of Western culture, to the point that the ‘Kafkaesque’ became a universal term to define the implausible, the absurd. It marked a before and after in Western culture.
Few writings have so captivated readers from all latitudes for so many decades like this one, especially because it is a short but devastating narrative. It is the story of the transformation of an obscure traveling salesman into an insect and the reaction it provokes in his family, feelings that range from solidarity and sorrow, to later transform into disgust and hatred, which will lead to a tragic outcome.
Kafka He influenced writers such as Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and Thomas Mann. Jorge Luis Borges, who translated the story for an Argentine publisher, writing the prologue, wrote: ‘The most indisputable virtue of Kafka It is the invention of intolerable situations.’ ‘Story of terror, fable about human lack of communication and conflict with authority, mirror of strangeness in the face of the arbitrary laws of the world, parable about the anguish and helplessness of modern man, metaphor for the tragic history of the Jewish people, oppression of the aristocratic society on the individual of his time are some of the ways to analyze this story, ‘beyond the obvious’.
These are some of the ways of understanding this book that, regardless of intellectual interpretations, excites and moves all those who read it as only great literature can. He left the press in 1915. Because before his death, in 1924, Kafka He had a mountain of unpublished stories, personal letters, such as to his love Felice, and even three novels: ‘The Trial’, ‘The Castle’ and ‘The Disappeared’.
On his deathbed he made his great friend Max Brod promise to burn all his unpublished work. Thanks to the ‘betrayal’ of this great friend and admirer of his, posterity was able to have in his hands works as ‘Kafkaesque’ as ‘The Trial’, which was adapted to film by the great Orson Welles.
Another Nobel Prize winner who felt captivated by ‘The Metamorphosis’ from his youth was precisely the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. ‘Gabo’ immortalized these words about the work: “I felt that I knew the plot of the stories, but I didn’t know how to write them.
Always, every attempt I made, I noticed that they were unsuccessful, that something was missing, and when I entered the Faculty of Law in Bogotá, one night I entered the house from the boarding room where I had a friend who read a lot and he passed me a little yellow book and told me: ‘Read this.’ Since it was the only thing available at that time, I went to bed. I read a lot, I read everything I could get my hands on and I opened that one and it said: ‘When Gregorio Samsa woke up one morning, after a restless dream, he found himself in his bed transformed into a monstrous insect.’ I remember it as if he had fallen out of bed at that moment and it was a revelation, I mean, if this can be done, this interests me.
In Peru, from 1979 onwards, the salsa ‘lagartazos’ who heard the tremendous song ‘Pedro Navaja’ for the first time had to run to look for a dictionary to find out who was that writer that Rubén Blades mentioned in the last stanza: ‘ Like in a novel Kafka‘, the drunk ran down the alley’. Even in popular music Kafka is present. I turn off the television.
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