Antkind: Charlie Kaufman’s debut novel is a hilarious tangle of baroque inventiveness

The screenwriter and director’s outlandish satire on ‘wokeness’ evokes the story-within-a-story ingenuity of his films

Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter and director: his debut novel finds him mellower but more hilarious than ever

FICTION

Antkind

By Charlie Kaufman

Penguin Random House, €25

Is being an artist just a socially acceptable form of madness? And if so, what does that make the critics devoting their lives to such an artist?

In his debut novel, screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman renders a world of vaulting creative obsessiveness, that of artist and critic alike. At the centre of his absurdist narrative is film critic B Roseberger Rosenberg (whose resemblance to contrarian New Yorker ...