Goatboy's Reviews > Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

Another fine book brought to my attention by the always wonderful Weird Studies podcast. In fact, been reading this alongside Phil Ford's Dig and they have been working very well together covering similar ground from different angles.

This is one of those 5 star ratings given not necessarily for the writing (although the writing really is special in its own way) but also for just how excited it got me for its story and atmosphere. Truly upset that it's such a short work. I could have read 100-200 pages more about Broyard's Greenwich Village.

As for the writing, I found it deceptively simple and concise. I say deceptive because even though the sentences were in general short and without much flowery embellishment, the sentences still seemed to ring out with lyricism and poetry. There is a matter of fact tone that reminded me of perhaps the source tone of writers like Brautigan and early Burroughs, and yet I had to keep reminding myself that Broyard wrote this memoir late in his life in the 1990's. If this memoir had indeed been written in the time it took place I'm sure it would have been banned for indecency. Not that anything seems wild by today's standards, but the descriptions of non-marital sex and other activities would not have been able to pass public judgement in the late 40's or 50's imo.

I found this memoir to be rich in detail, inspiring, creative and creativity-inspiring, and enjoyable on a page-to-page, nay sentence-to-sentence level. It was my first real exposure to this pre-Beat world of Greenwich Village, and after this and Dig I'll definitely be hunting for other books from this era.