In my late teens, I went through a big Franz Kafka phase. Many kids did, especially those living in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. However, I lived in rural England at the time, the friendly and welcoming village of Cutesy Wood to be specific, nestling in the quaint county of sunny Comfortshire. So a truly immersive Kafka experience was very difficult for me to maintain in such bucolic conditions. Obviously, I would have been better off going through a J. R. Tolkien phase, but I wasn't what the locals referred to as 'a total wanker.' There was absolutely no way someone as au-courant as me was going to prattle on about Hobbits and gnomes when I could be condemning the modern world with a single, withering glance.
But, bereft of dark alleys, ominous shadows and threatening presences in Cutesy Wood, my only Kafkaesque recourse was pretending to be refused entry to nearby Cutesy castle, even though most of its walls had been destroyed by Oliver Cromwell's cannons several centuries before, and anybody could freely wander in and out of what remained of the old castle keep whenever they pleased. Nevertheless, I regularly stalked the perimeter with my carefully cultivated paranoia and fake sense of foreboding, much to the consternation of the many families enjoying their picnics beside the crumbling ramparts. When at home, after enduring a roast chicken dinner and delicious dessert, I confined myself to The Sanatorium (what most people would call an average teenager's bedroom), writing tortured letters to my imaginary Felice Bauer: "Dear Felice, went with mother to buy that dark suit and tie I need for The Trial, but she bought me a bright blue v-neck sweater for school instead. Life is Hell here in Cutesy Wood."
One disastrous October, I attended a Hallowe'en party disguised as the cockroach from Kafka's great story, The Metamorphosis. Unfortunately, none of the other guests had read the book so were unable to distinguish me from someone dressed in a normal, non-Kafkaesque cockroach costume. I'm Gregor Samsa, I told anyone who asked, but only received blank looks in return. Later, while loitering around the punch bowl, I mistakenly assumed an attractive girl in cowboy boots and stetson hat was going through her Zane Grey phase. Alas, it turned out she was just a fan of Honky Tonk music, completely unfamiliar with Zane Grey's bibliography, and thought I was being rude at best and lewdly suggestive at worst. I left the party early, walking home along leafy, moonlit lanes, pretending I was lost in a labyrinth of menacing Prague streets, being followed by grim-faced assassins sent by The Law.
Ah, the amusingly adolescent world of make-believe existential anxiety: switching philosophical stances from Kafka to Camus and back again via Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett; to be sad and beautiful while pronouncing pseudo-intellectual judgments on everything and everyone around you. Surely that's what youth is all about, provided youth grows out of such pretensions and quit the Gauloises. Nowadays, of course, we have young adults still stuck in the world of Harry Potter wizardry. But despite all the sparkly magic and vigorous horseplay, they really are existentially anxious instead of just pretending. Some are even suicidal. What is a society that has apparently decided to spurn serious European literature going to do about that? Personally, I swapped out my nephew's copy of The Chamber of Secrets for Le Grand Meaulnes when he wasn't looking. Think globally, act locally, I say.