Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi

art to move too far from the market, and for the market to move too far from art, fatherhood makes you serious. It wasn’t until I had children that I saw I had to concentrate. I had to get on with it, making more work, supporting the children with my pen, or find, for the first time, a proper job.
    *
    Now and again, to nicely devalue me, as if I’ve got the wrong idea about who I am, my youngest son will suddenly start to abuse me wildly in the foulest language, saying the hardest things he can think of. Then he looks at me nervously and asks, ‘Are you still alive?’ But today he is in a mild mood, and merely says, ‘Come on, old fellow, don’t give up, you can do it – maybe …’
    He will run with fitter people, I tell him. But he doesn’t like to compete with his friends, for fear of losing and being humiliated. I can only say that if you don’t compete, you have already lost, that your conflicts make you, and that, if you can, you must welcome them. Yet he will have a lifetime of competition ahead of him: for friends, lovers, sex, jobs. Substituting the lost paradise of a secure childhood for the intenser vagaries of sex and love, he will win and lose. He will be envied, hated even; he will enjoy the pleasures of brutality, and will suffer from sexual jealousy; there’s no cure for that, or for any of it.
    *
    At the end of the street I can see all he has been holding back. He turns it on, rushing along the pavement to the gate, ‘destroying me’, as he puts it, and laughing when I finally turn up.
    At last we are home; he takes off the weights, and we both lie on our backs on the floor. We are together, and we are happy together for a while.

His Father’s Excrement: Franz Kafka and the Power of the Insect
    In the famous, reproachful ‘Letter to His Father’, which Franz Kafka wrote in 1919 but, characteristically, never delivered, the writer recalls an early memory in which the old man left the whimpering young boy on the balcony at night, ‘outside the shut door’, just because he wanted a drink of water.
    â€˜I mention it as typical of your methods of bringing up a child and their effect on me. I dare say I was quite obedient afterward at that period, but it did me inner harm … Even years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony, and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.’
    Far from being an absent, unimpressive father, Hermann Kafka was an overwhelming man: too noisy, too vital, too big, too present for his son, so much so that Franz was unable ever to abandon or break with him. Although Franz wrote in his diary, ‘A man without a woman is no person,’ and came close to marrying FeliceBauer and, later, Julie Wohryzek, he could not become a husband or father himself. Franz Kafka was otherwise engaged: he and his father were locked in an eternal arm-wrestle.
    Kafka takes the ‘absolutely nothing’ of his ‘Letter’ very seriously. In the two stories discussed here, ‘The Metamorphosis’ and ‘A Hunger Artist’, written seven years apart, this ‘nothing’ becomes literalised. Out of fury and frustration, Kafka’s characters use their worthless bodies – these so-called ‘nothings’ – as a weapon, even as a suicide bomb, to destroy others and, in the end, themselves.
    In ‘The Metamorphosis’, generally considered to be one of the greatest novellas ever written, and a foundation stone of early modernism, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he has become transformed from a human being – a hard-working travelling salesman, a son and a brother – into an insect, a bug, or a large dung beetle, depending on the translation. And in ‘A Hunger Artist’ the protagonist, a determined