The Limited Circle Is Pure: Kafka makes novelists nervous. He doesn't seem to write like the rest of us. Either he is too good for the novel or the novel is not quite good enough for him - whichever it is, his imitators are very few.
Now, why is that? Where are Kafka's descendants? Only a handful - Borges, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard - have successfully "channeled" the Kafkaesque in any meaningful way. The result has been queer.
