english Kafka?

"He didn't feel that he had been tried and found wanting, rather that he had not been tried and had no idea of whether he was wanting or not." 

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child

[It perhaps goes without saying, that by this point, we are well past the point where a comparison to the works of Kafka really makes any sense. We even have an adjective, which can sometimes feel as though it's also a label for a whole raft of work which likely has actually little in common with the work of the great Czech writer. There is nothing obviously or overtly Kafkaesque about the work of Penelope Fitzgerald, yet here we have a sentence which seems close in some ways at least to the comedy and absurdism, a sympathy with failure entirely lacking the comfort of sentimentality, that we find in Kafka. Unless I'm mistaken. It's been so long since I last read Kafka, back in my days of being a Serious Young Man.

[Yet recall that Kafka loved the novels of Charles Dickens (was Amerika not at least partly intended to be a rewrite of Martin Chuzzlewit?). And, if I may be excused a detour here, wasn't Jane Austen a favourite of Edward Gorey? It's not that we need foreigners to point this out, but I think that many admirers of these canonical English authors can perhaps easily miss the abyss which yawns beneath the tightly held social worlds depicted in their fiction. We can sometimes mistake for safety what is actually extremely precarious. Menace is after all rarely far from comedy, but it's so easy to overlook. Penelope Fitzgerald certainly understood that. And, even in an early, deliberately comic novel such as this, she has the capacity to make you weep.]