"I don’t know if you read a couple of years ago in the papers about that teenage girl and boy who murdered the girl’s mother. It starts with a very Kafkaesque scene: the girl’s mother has come home and found her daughter and the boy in the bedroom, and the boy has hit the mother with a hammer—several times—and dragged her away. But the woman is still thrashing and groaning in the kitchen, and the boy says to his sweetheart, “Gimme the hammer. I think I’ll have to knock her again.” But the girl gives her mate a knife instead and he stabs the girl’s mother many, many times, to death—under the impression, probably, that this all is a comic strip: you hit a person, the person sees lots of stars and exclamation marks but revives by and by, in the next installment. Physical life however has no next installment, and soon boy and girl have to do something with dead mother. “Oh, plaster of paris, it will dissolve her completely!” Of course, it will—marvelous idea—place body in bathtub, cover with plaster, and that’s all. Meanwhile, with mother under the plaster (which does not work—wrong plaster, perhaps) boy and girl throw several beer parties. What fun! Lovely canned music, and lovely canned beer. “But you can’t go, fellas, to the bathroom. The bathroom is a mess.”
"For Nabokov, the incident was illustrative of a certain ugly strain of human nature that Kafka was driving at. It was a way for him to show the undergraduates that the horror of the short story was realer and more familiar to them—and at the same time more strangely horrible—than it first appeared. “I’m trying to show you,” Nabokov told them, “that in so-called real life we find sometimes a great resemblance to the situation in Kafka’s fantastic story.” He was drawing their attention toward “the curious mentality of the morons in Kafka who enjoy their evening paper despite the fantastic horror in the middle of their apartment.”'
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/07/vladimir-nabokov-tyler-hadley-murder-port-st-lucie.html#ixzz1TH6x5OHj
