Amerika

Contrary to its reputation, “Amerika” is not Kafka's darkest book. A boy named Karl Rossmann is expelled from his home and enters a country Kafka never visited — a country of elevators, factories, enormous theatres and sudden chances. Beneath the brightness lies the same Kafka question: how can a person be himself in a place where he does not belong?

The novel is unfinished, but it is also his most generous. Its America is a dream made of newspapers and lectures, a place where kindness and exploitation arrive in the same sentence. It is the best book to read if you have been told that Kafka is only a writer of nightmares.

Start here if you want the comic Kafka: the one who laughs at institutions while describing them with terrifying precision.