'Logic is doubtless unshakeable,' Joseph K. thinks towards the end of The Trial, 'but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.' He is wrong, of course, since he is killed within a page by the brutal logic of the novel he is in. But there is a logic that resists such logic, and one of its masters is Joseph H., author of Catch 22 and other objections to the absurdity of dying.

LRB 20 October 1994 | PDF Download