Way Out

At the Academy, La Farge will continue working on a collection of short stories, “Way Out.” He takes the title from a line in Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy.” Red Peter, an ape who has, with great effort, learned to live as a human being, tells the reader, “I wasn’t looking for freedom, only for a way out.” Red Peter finds himself more securely trapped by human language and norms than by any system of locks and bars. La Farge uses this struggle to link several stories. In “Rosendale,” a young woman, April P, fights to take control of her story—and thus of her life—but finds that her hard-won identity as a writer is itself a kind of constraint. In “The Observers,” the narrator tries to escape his childhood home by means of a telescope, which only entangles him further in the past; and in “Postmortem,” the main character attempts to flee a disappointing life by constructing an endless fictional story, whose characters only disappoint. In addition to speaking with several Berlin organizations dedicated to helping refugees, La Farge will also research the sources from which Kafka might have drawn for his stories: Carl Hagenbeck and the invention of the modern zoo and, tangentially, Hagenbeck’s “human zoos.” La Farge writes, “There’s been a certain amount of talk recently about writers trying on other people’s hats; I’d like to make a careful effort to put on some uncomfortable historical and experiential shoes.”