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by suoduandao3 715 days ago
The one book I recall that 'bit and stung' as I think Kafka meant to say was 1984. How would you categorize that work? Torture porn?
2 comments

Oh god no, that’s definitely in the cynically written in bad faith hacky partisan politics category. Maybe it just hasn’t aged well, but I couldn’t get through it.
This is (to me) a strange comment. I assume it refers to the fact that some right-wingers have latched onto Orwell. But that happened long after his death.

Orwell was a British Socialist, and the people he's attacking in the books are totalitarians, whether fascist or Stalinist. So it's neither bad faith nor partisan unless you count anti-totalitarian as a party, though I guess hacky is in the eye of the beholder.

"1984" is a quintessential example of literature that challenges and provokes, embodying Kafka’s idea of a book that serves as "the axe for the frozen sea inside us."