Aphorisms
by Franz Kafka
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Book Summary Information
Author: Franz KafkaTranslator: Michael Hofmann
Translator: Geoffrey Brock
Commentary: Roberto Calasso
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2006-12-26
ISBN: 0805212078
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Schocken
Book Reviews of Aphorisms
Book Review: Heroism
Summary: 5 Stars
Writing about Kafka is just as difficult and always more useless (in the Kafka-esque sense) than reading Kafka. Really the only people who ought to be allowed to write about Kafka are those who live in caves or at the bottom of wells or in high mountain towers and have studied Kafka's work for fifty years. He evades interpretation, as Harold Bloom pointed out, which is another way of saying he is hard to understand.
I think the best way to take these aphorisms is with something like the steely commitment of a scholar-monk in the dark ages piecing together out of rare manuscripts the arcane glories of a past world. The extreme heroism of the writer must summon forth a similar heroism in the reader. One must live with Kafka rather than devour him.
Only a fool would seek to interpret Kafka in an amazon review. I am, of course, a fool so I would suggest that the phrase "The impossibility of spirit" would be not too much more deceptive, partial, or misleading a statement than any other when considering Kafka's work. Certainly for Kafka the spiritual and the political are both present (or absent; one sees what I mean!); great writers like Theodor Adorno are simply wrong to read Kafka as only or primarily a political writer. Both possibilities must be kept in mind.
These days, in literature, Kafka is often made the signatory of many more minor literary projects engaged in by lesser though esteemable writers. It is helpful to return to the reluctant master himself to be aware of life's inextinguishable distances. Kafka wasn't trying to create the "Kafka-esque" or be strange in a way that would appeal to hoardes of white middle class semi-intellectuals. He was trying to set down in clear and readable prose what he thought and what he felt whether he had anything in common with it or not.
Amazon will not permit me to give Mr. Franz Kafka as many stars as I would like. My choices are limited to only five.
Summary of Aphorisms
The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century?s most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso.Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These ?aphorisms? appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings?some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka?s death in 1924. While working on K., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zürau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka?s opus?a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.
The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.
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