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Alex Stein’s Variations in the Key of K (Etruscan Press, August 2020), retells the story of Franz Kafka, the tortured Czech writer most famous for his novella The Metamorphosis,
a story about a man who wakes up one morning to find himself
transformed into a large insect. Kafka’s other work, particularly his
novels The Trial and The Castle, explore the surreal
and are steeped in a sense of alienation and dread, so it is odd to
think of their author as a humorist, but this is one of the ways that
Stein sees him.
“Kafka is said to have laughed until he wept reading aloud from The Metamorphosis,” Stein wrote in response to my question asking what connects the main characters, and subjects, of Variations in the Key of K:
Franz Kafka, William Blake, and Pablo Picasso. “All three possess comic
genius,” Stein wrote. “Thomas Mann called Kafka a ‘religious humorist.’
Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his sympathetic biography of Blake,
wrote of ‘the cool insanity of Blake’s humor’ and Picasso was a clown,
from crown to toe, and intended to be. Three hilarious humans. Blake
coined such comic gems as, ‘The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of
Wisdom,’ and Picasso was really just a comic actor playing the lifelong
role of the creative genius.”
Stein first became interested in Kafka as a teenager: “A neighbor to whose house I had come trick-or-treating put a copy of The Trial in my Halloween bag.
‘It is scary,’ the neighbor told me. ‘And it won’t impact your oral health the way candy would.’
I must have been about twelve. The neighbor was rationalizing because
they had forgotten it was Halloween and were not expecting any trick or
treaters. After I left (I had dressed as the ghost of Elvis) they turned
off their porch light. I kept the book around, never thinking to read
it. It was a rotten trick to play on a kid. Kafka instead of candy. But a
few years later I was recovering from an illness and had read through
everything else in my bedroom, so I picked up The Trial, read
it, squinched up my face and read it some more, and discovered something
important about myself. I am the sort of person who enjoys reading
Kafka. It turns out there are many of us. But we are still very rare.”
It was around the same time, although for different reasons, that Stein
decided to try his hand at writing, an occupation that sprung from his
desire to be a professional talent show emcee: “My job would be to
introduce a curious or comical or death-defying or thrilling or poignant
or balletic or triumphant or nerve-wracking act. Afterward, I would
make remarks about the performers. ‘They looked nervous out there,’ I
would imagine myself saying of a dance troupe as they absented the
stage. ‘Next time they should try to think of everyone in the audience
as wearing only top hats and undergarments. That’s what I do.’ This
sounded in my head as I imagined it, at the age of 14 or so, like
sophisticated repartee.
Unfortunately, there turns out to be no such job as talent show emcee.
(Anyhow, there are very few such jobs). If I wanted to host a talent
show I had two choices. I could pretend to do so, as I had always done,
or I could give up wanting to do so. I preferred continuing to pretend.
Pretending led to writing.
Writing was not as satisfying as doing the thing for real, but it
occupied my imagination and that was important to me, even as a kid. If
my imagination was not occupied in a focused way, it would wander all
over the place.”
Variations in the Key of K itself is like a talent show,
exhibiting the skills of some of the modern world’s most interesting
(and humorous) folks. What type of an audience did Stein envision for
such a piece of art? “People from the future,” came Stein’s answer. “I
would say the people of 2060. They will have the perfect perspective. It
is only two generations from now. Forty years. Not long, really, for a
book to find its audience. Some books, of course, find their audience
overnight, like lightning. Other books take hundreds of years to find
their audience. The vast majority never find any audience at all. Forty
years is nothing. Of course my parents will most likely be dead by then
and I would have liked to make them proud with my literary success but
who knows, maybe if I tell them what a big deal my book will be in the
future, they will be proud just to know that.”
A sense of humor is necessary when you’re a writer, especially when you
are writing in, and about, a world that makes little sense most of the
time. His latest project is a three-act play about the end of time: “The
stage is dark, empty, and silent, through the first two 40-minute acts.
This is meant to build tension for the last act which I call, ‘the germ
of a new universe.’ The play is still in an experimental phase. I am
road testing it, virtually, reading all the parts online to friends
around the country. It takes two and a half hours. Two actors. One
onstage, one offstage. So far none of my friends will sit through, even,
the first two acts. ‘It is too conceptual,’ they complain. ‘But that is
exactly the point,’ I reply. They don’t get it, though. Which is
irritating, frankly.”
Alex Stein was born in Washington State and raised in Canada. He is the co-editor of Short Flights,
an anthology of modern aphorisms. He received a doctoral degree in
Writing and Literature from the University of Denver. He works as a
research librarian at the University of Colorado.
Jason Miller earned a M.A. in Playwriting and a M.F.A. in
Creative Writing from the Maslow Graduate Program at Wilkes University,
where he served as a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press.
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