Readers' Club Live: Kafka!

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A man wakes up as an enormous insect, a circus artist fasts until death, a hangman demonstrates a new torture machine, a son has his father sentence him to death by drowning.

The stories of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) are often absurd, but they are presented with the highest degree of realism and in a simple style. Kafka's tragicomic main characters, laden with a guilt feeling based on nothing, try to make the best of the nightmare that life is.
In NRC's Reaers' Club Live columnists and editors of the NRC book pages Elsbeth Etty and Bas Heijne discuss with each other, writer/lawyer Naema Tahir and the audience The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, the new Kafka translation by Willem van Toorn. Host is chief editor of NRC's book pages, Pieter Steinz.

Over the years Kafka's work has been read as a quest for God, a satire on eastern European bureaucracy, an allegory on the human condition and a symbolic autobiography. Kafka serves all sorts of purposes, and exactly that makes him such a suitable subject for the fifth edition of the successful Readers' Club Live at Winternachten.

Information

Date and time Saturday 16 January 2010 from 14:00 to 16:30 hrs
Location Theater aan het Spui - grote zaal

Line-up

Elsbeth Etty

(Hulshorst, NL, 1951) received the Anne Vondeling Award for political journalism in 2008, owing to her sharp analyses of social problems. She is a journalist in the widest sense of the word. Besides being an editor and columnist with the NRC Handelsblad newspaper, she makes frequent appearances on radio and TV. In 2007 she debuted as a novelist with Maak jezelf maar klaar (Go Get Yourself Off), in which one of the characters from Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven figures as a main character. Etty obtained her Ph.D. with distinction from Utrecht University with a biography of Henriëtte Roland Holst, Liefde is heel het leven niet (Love Is Not All of Life, 1996). Her newspaper columns appeared in four different books. Her reviews were compiled in Dames gaan voor - Van Hella Haasse to Connie Palmen (Ladies First: From Hella Haasse to Connie Palmen, 1999). Etty is a special lecturer in Literary Criticism at the Free University in Amsterdam, and is now at work on a biography of the late Dutch poet and songwriter Willem Wilmink.
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Pieter Steinz

(Rotterdam 1963 - Haarlem 2016) in 2010 published Grote Verwachtingen. Opgroeien in de letteren in 25 schema’s (Great Expectations. Growing up in Literature in 25 Charts). He did the same in Luisteren & cetera, (Listening etc) about 25 1970s pop albums. Somewhat earlier Macbet heeft echt geleefd (Macbeth Really Existed) appeared, on places where literary heroes used to live. In Verleden in verf (Past in Paint, 2011), Steinz sketches Dutch history in forty paintings. Steinz became an art editor with NRC Handelsblad in 1989. From 2005-2011 he headed the bookpages of that paper. Steinz studied ancient history and English. Earlier he wrote, among other books, Klein ABC van de wereldliteratuur (Concise ABC of world literature; 2008), Het web van de wereldliteratuur (The World Literature Web; 2007) and Lezen op locatie (Reading on Location; 2003), sixty maps on which he identifies where masterpieces of literature are set. In 2010 he published De Duivelskunstenaar (The wizard), a journey through Europe in search of Faust. Since 2012 Steinz has been head of the Dutch Literary Fund. He died in august 2016.
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Naema Tahir

(Great Britain, 1970) came to The Netherlands at age nine with her Pakistani parents. She read law and worked for various government ministries, the UNHCR and the Council of Europe in Strassbourg. In 2006, however, she decided to settle in the Netherlands and focus on her writer's career. In the fall of 2008 her book of Muslim fairy tales Little Green Ridinghood And the Converted Wolf appeared, in which she jocularly deals with the clash of civilizations. In Lonely Present (2008) a migrant child tells about its feeling of being uprooted. Tahir made her debut with the nonfiction anthology A Muslima Unveiled, dealing with themes such as Muslims' self-criticism and women's liberation. Her fiction debut Precious Property (2006), a book with candid erotic stories, was a great success. Tahir is a regular contributor to the public debate. Her articles have been published by Volkskrant en NRC-Handelsblad among others. In 2008 she was one of the guests in the VPRO television programme Zomergasten (Summer Guests).
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Bas Heijne

(Nijmegen, NL, 1960) writes essays, short stories and plays, and is a columnist with the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad. He published the novels Laatste woorden (Last words) and Suez and received the Henriëtte Roland Holst Prize in 2005. In 2011's Moeten wij van elkaar houden, het populisme ontleed (Do We Have to Love One Another? Populism Dissected) Heijne shows how globalisation and individualism pave the way for populism. Angst en schoonheid (Fear and Beauty) was published in 2013, an essay about Dutch writer Louis Couperus, whom Heijne admires. In the same year his documentary about Couperus was broadcast. In 2015 he hosted the five-part documentary De volmaakte mens (The Perfect Human). In 2016 his essay Onbehagen – nieuw licht op de beschaafde mens (Discontent - new light on civilized man) was published. In 2017 Heijne received the P.C. Hooft Award for his essayistic works.
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