Guus Bosman

One of my favorite authors who write in German is Franz Kafka. so I read what is his most characteristic book: Der Proceß. Reading in German is a lot slower than reading in English so it kept me busy during my travels to the Netherlands and Germany a few weeks ago.

It's a beautiful, disturbing book about a trial. It makes you realize that bureaucracy could always be worse -- it could be like Kafka's.

It was a beautiful book to read, and I was very interested to see how it would end. The strange order of the chapters in the end threw me off -- I never read reviews of books before I read them so I didn't know that the book was left not quite finished by the author, even though the final chapter was written.

I've read Das Schloss in the past and just recently I read Die Verwandlung. The next Kafka on my list is Amerika, or perhaps I'll read some of his short stories first.

Sasha recommended Steinbeck to me and we had this book in our collection. What a great read! The language is so beautiful. I loved the short chapter on how the turtle walks through the field and crosses the highway.

The Joad family takes highway 64 in the book, starting from Salisaw to Gore. I looked it up on Google maps, and parallel to that old 64 is now... I-40, the highway I take to work everyday and which goes from North Carolina to California.

The speed on the highway seemed to be fairly similar to what it is today with a maximum speed of 65 miles per hour. Of course, the 'jalopies' did not make that speed.

Very cool that there is even a reference to the city we live in, or to be more specific to the tobacco that was produced here. Tom at one point says: "I wish I had some Durham".

I've wanted to read this book for a long time. In 1998, when I just moved to Amsterdam to go to college my roommates talked often about Dostoevsky. Recently I reviewed a couple of 'top 100 novel' lists, and it invariably scores very high.

I'll keep the review short -- this is an absolutely brilliant novel. There is nothing I can add in this review that hasn't been said many times before by much better reviewers.

What struck me were the huge differences between how the rich lived and how the poor lived; it may give some insight into why the Revolution happened in Russia years later.

As the author states in the introduction, Primo Levi is a both a chemical engineer and writer/poet. This book is just beautiful. It has Mr. Levi's observations of the world around him, and topics range from chemistry to the house where he lives.