Kafka's Monkey

Young Vic - Red Peter 03/06/09

A Report To An Academy 

"Honored members of the Academy! You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape."

A Confederacy Of Dunces

One of the funniest books ever written has got to be A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. 

The title is a quote from Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." It would be approved by the unlikely protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly. The grossly overweight, ridiculous Reilly considers himself a misunderstood genius who is always about to burst forth onto the world to put it all right, if only all the small-minded fools would follow his bizarre instructions. 

"Psycho? The woman's senile. We had to stop at about thirty gas stations on the way over here. Finally I got tired of getting out of the car and showing her which was the Men's and which was the Women's, so I let her pick them herself. I worked out a system. The law of averages. I laid money on her and she came out about fifty-fifty."  — John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)  

Waldo

Countless hours of my life have been spent looking for this punter. Try and find Waldo. He's got on a distinctive red-and-white striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses, but be careful, this illustration contains "red herrings" involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects. 

 

Godspeed.

Behemoth

I managed to find one of Mikhail Bulgakov's novels online; The Master and Margarita.

In the story the Devil visits Stalinist Moscow to see if he can do some good.

"Not causing trouble, not touching anything, fixing the primus." — Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)

"'I shall sit down,' replied the cat, sitting down, 'but I shall enter an objection with regard to your last. My speeches in no way resemble verbal muck, as you have been pleased to put it in the presence of a lady, but rather a sequence of tightly packed syllogisms, the merit of which would be appreciated by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella, and, for all I know, Aristotle himself.'
'Your king is in check,' said Woland.
'Very well, very well,' responded the cat, and he began studying the chessboard through his opera glasses.
'And so, donna,' Woland addressed Margarita, 'I present to you my retinue. This one who is playing the fool is the cat Behemoth...'" — Mikhail Bulgakov 
(The Master and Margarita)

Click here to read the book online.

Never Talk To Strangers

'Say at last – who art thou?'
'That Power I serve
Which wills forever evil
Yet does forever good.'

Goethe, Faust