Sunday, December 02, 2007

Out Of the Box

I'm currently reading the collection of best short stories written by Franz Kafka and I'm strangely struggling very hard to keep up with it. I won't try to deny it, I seriously don't get him or his strange innuendoes of human flaws and falsehood in living. I feel choked by the way he clearly describes something yet his direct intentions remain unclear. I hate it that I have to make my own sense of everything and give every single incident my own personal understanding. But I think it might be that I'm just not used to the genre and subconsciously, I do not want to suit myself to it.

Some of my friends might know that I have this weird fascination over Indian and Chinese writers, especially of those living/had lived in Western countries. I seem to think that I can borrow their cap for a while and try to configure my thoughts according to theirs because we have the solidarity of coming from an Eastern country with all its mores and moral but realistically, it's a modern cut-throat world where these traditions cannot seem to survive. These dilemmas are something I think I can identify with even if I was just living in Malaysia because it encapsulates the possible ways I'm threatened to drive my life.

But the thing is that, usually these Eastern-Western clash is a potrayal of a real world where these writers somehow try to tell you how to function and how to act. They provide you with implicitly hidden solutions to life and I think I've been groomed to function in what is real and tangible that I find it very hard to accept the lessons immaculately postulated by the Metamorphosis of Kafka's Gregor Samsa or the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice's Lestat.

I wished that I was more open-minded and I wished that I can somehow tell myself to stop refraining to read the stories until they're finished. I guess education is going to be a lifelong process for me indeed and I hope to see the day that I will stop despising people for not writing the way I want them to... :p

1 comment:

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