![]() ![]() He feels like a runaway and quickly returns. When he does venture out into what functions here as an echo of the Edenic orchard, he bites into the apple but leaves it hanging on the branch, half-eaten and unpicked. So, he tells himself he needs to be officially released by the prison’s colonel and have properly tailored clothes. After years inside, where every decision was made for him, he feels distraught and “out of bounds” (38) at the prospect of being released to the outside with “no point of reference whatsoever” (21). Kosef J attempts to rationalize his inability to exert free will or even walk through the open gate in ways that reveal how dependent he has become on the system, how conditioned to follow rules. Komporaly renders Visniec’s lucid absurdism in all its poetry but without poeticizing, and with an intimate understanding of his characters’ interiority and tonal quirks. However, the omniscient narration, transplanted skillfully into English by Jozefina Komporaly, draws us into a world of distress, self-doubt, and conflicting ideas and emotions so persuasively concocted sentence by sentence that it is impossible not to feel for-and with-the agonizing Mr. That Kosef J experiences his release as a sentence, and is filled with trepidation rather than joy, might strike us at first as absurd. Even before he discovers an entire community of escaped convicts living within the abandoned parameters of the penal colony, and thus neither inside nor outside, Kosef J concludes that the boundary between the two worlds is “frail beyond belief” (84), and the elsewhere he had coveted for so long is only negligibly different from life as an inmate. The irony of the letter swap in the two protagonists’ names reveals its richness gradually, as the borders between inside and outside (or imprisoned and released) become increasingly porous and the opposites swappable. Both protagonists make futile attempts to navigate and understand bureaucracies and systems that cast freedom at best as relative, if not illusory. If Kafka’s K dies without ever finding out the nature of the accusations that led to his arrest, Visniec’s K is plagued by similarly consuming questions about the nature and purpose of his release from prison. If anything, a new century obsessed with “freedoms” expressed through the global circulation of bodies and information has muddled our understanding. Still, as Visniec insists both in this novel and in his widely performed and much celebrated plays, we remain clueless, or at best confused, as to what freedom truly is. K in 1988, though the novel did not appear in print in Romanian until 2010. ![]() Kafka penned the tragic fate of his K in 1914-1915 and Visniec started working on Mr. ![]() After all, Josef K is separated by almost a century from his literary kin. K Released, so we may be inclined to read that as an auspicious beginning. “One fine day, Kosef J found himself released from prison” (1), announces Mat éi Visniec in Mr. “Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested” (1), begins Kafka’s The Trial (1925). That we are in fact on Kafkaesque ground becomes evident immediately, though Camus, Becket, Ionesco, Orwell, and Saramago make their presence felt gradually as well. When we spot, in the novel’s first sentence, the protagonist’s name, Kosef J, anagrammed from Joseph K., we recognize the nod to Kafka. In 1987, at the age of thirty-one, he managed to escape Ceausescu’s authoritarian regime and apply for political asylum in France, where he finally settled two years later, in 1989. Visniec’s own transition, more drastic than that of most of his compatriots, provides additional inspiration. K Released draws on the chaotic transition from totalitarianism to democracy that Romania, Matéi Visniec’s homeland, and other former Eastern Bloc countries, experienced after the collapse of communism in the late 1980s. Part parable of human fallibility, part allegorical critique of political systems at which we fail and which fail us, Mr. ![]()
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