After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself, ' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him. .Andrew Wilson
About This Quote
K.K. Burgum once said that he had read hundreds of novels by Patricia Highsmith, but only one novel by her troubled him. Patricia Highsmith wrote a book entitled The Child with a Monkey, which is very similar to Kafka’s A Hunger Artist. In the book the protagonist is a young girl named Mary who is taken hostage by a man named George, who becomes obsessed with her after she is seen hanging out with his son.
George puts her in an insane asylum and forces her to eat food laced with sleeping pills. When she wakes up, she is unable to move or speak and feels as if she has “been drugged for years” and as if “her soul has been uprooted from its body and cast away as rubbish.”
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