Kafka, Bolaño y el sobrino de Josefina la cantante

• Authors: Chacana Arancibia Roberto

Title variants

EN

Kafka, Bolaño and the nephew of Josefina the singer

• Languages of publication: ES

Abstracts

EN

The article analyzes the links between the stories “The rat policeman”, by Roberto Bolaño, and “Josephine the singer or The mouse folk”, by Franz Kafka. It is argued that Bolaño wrote his story as a tribute to Kafka’s story, taking from it a series of aspects from which he introduces two distinctive topics of his own work: the crimes and the search for the murderer. But Bolaño does something else: he expands the notion of disappearance, showing it not as a decision that affects a single rat (Kafka’s Josefina, in this case), but as a phenomenon that hovers threateningly over the entire folk. The article also underlines a surprising fact: “The rat policeman” was published posthumously in the midst of circumstances very similar to those surrounding the appearance of “Josefina the singer or The mouse folk”, which unexpectedly increases the links between the two stories.

Keywords

EN

Franz Kafka; Roberto Bolaño; “Josephine the singer or The mouse folk”; “The rat policeman”

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Svět literatury – Časopis pro novodobé literatury (World of Literature – Journal for Modern Literatures)
• Year: 2023
• Volume: 33
• Issue: Special Issue
• Pages: 117-125

Contributors

author

Chacana Arancibia Roberto