Kafka, Bolaño y el sobrino de Josefina la cantante

Abstract

The article analyzes the links between the stories “The rat policeman”, by Roberto Bolaño, and “Josephine the singer or The mouse folk”, by Franz Kafka. It is argued that Bolaño wrote his story as a tribute to Kafka’s story, taking from it a series of aspects from which he introduces two distinctive topics of his own work: the crimes and the search for the murderer. But Bolaño does something else: he expands the notion of disappearance, showing it not as a decision that affects a single rat (Kafka’s Josefina, in this case), but as a phenomenon that hovers threateningly over the entire folk. The article also underlines a surprising fact: “The rat policeman” was published posthumously in the midst of circumstances very similar to those surrounding the appearance of “Josefina the singer or The mouse folk”, which unexpectedly increases the links between the two stories.

Keywords

• franz kafka
• roberto bolaño
• “josephine the singer or the mouse folk”
• “the rat policeman”