Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories
by Franz Kafka
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Book Reviews of Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories
Book Review: What are my lungs for, anyways?
Summary: 3 Stars
Kafka. What a guy. Of the 27 reviews so far, only 1 (brothersjudddotcom) has dared to give less than 5 stars. He did a good job with his review, but I feel I need to add some as well to help balance all the stars Kafka is recieving here, and giving the review browser a diferent angle always helps. As can probably be expected, the short stories are a mixed bag. There are about a half dozen good ones, and there are a few absolutely terrible ones. "The Burrow" was particularly painful.
That said; I did not come into the reading with much biographical knowledge about Kafka other than that in the introduction. Quickly, however, it became apparent that the poor guy is not comfortable with life. Death, suicide, starvation, a feeling of powerlessness; these things run common among the stories. Kafka does not even feel human! His characters inhabit dogs, cockroaches, mice, apes, and some large burrowing-type creature. The "modern" world alienates man, so-to-speak; it is unnatural. bah. Modern times are the best times to be alive! Man only counts his sorrows, doesn't he? Kafka sure counted alot of them...
There was some humor, but not nearly enough to overcome the pessimism. My goodness, why bother getting up in the morning? The rotting apple in the posterior = the sin of homosexuality is an interesting idea; but I think it is more significant that Gregor Samsa actually starves to death. The running theme of admiration for starvation is disturbing. Combined with the "Hunger Artist," dying because he "couldn't find the food he liked" and "Investigations of a Dog," where a dog (Kafka) does not accept religious sustenance or practical, scientific sustenance; rather choosing to starve to death (another dog *forces* him to eat something); Starving oneself becomes a noble rejection of life and all its horrible complicated troubles. Freedom, horrible, horrible freedom is bemoaned in a similar way to how Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor puts it. Freedom, however, defines modern thought.
Kafkaism. Kafkaesque. Here are a few for you:
"What help, then, do my colleagues find? What kind of attempts do they make to manage to go on living in spite of everything?"
"I can only see decline everywhere"
"the highest effort among us is voluntary fasting" "I was tortured by the fancy that I would never be able to eat again."
"It seemed to me I was seperated from all my fellows, not by a quite short stretch, by by an infinite distance"
"I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground, I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth."
"My heart hurt, for now it seemed impossible to escape from my suffering."
"...It cannot be made good, not ever." (the haunting conclusion to The Country Doctor, a masterpiece... but still laden with an unreasonable pessimism. We are utterly powerless, at the mercy of a violent world. So?)
And my personal favorite:
"What are our lungs supposed to do?" I shouted. Shouted: "If they breath fast they suffocate themselves from inner poisons; if they breath slowly they suffocate from unbreathable air, from outraged things. But if they try to search for their own rythm they perish from the mere search."
The most curious thing is that in the introduction it says that Kafka sometimes read his work aloud to his friends, and had to pause often to laugh uproariously. I laughed possibly twice while reading this, the humor has not aged well. I think the only reason you'd read this is so you can say "I've read Kafka" and puff out your chest. If you absolutely must read something in this, read the Country Doctor. It almost has a rythm.
Book Review: The Best Kafka Shorts Collection Available
Summary: 5 Stars
With a great introduction by John Updike, this is the best Kafka short story compilation I have found to date. I have read a lot of Kafka and believe that his shorts include some of his best work. This version presents some of the cleanest translations I have encountered and I think that with them we receive a much more approachable translation. For and introduction to Kafka this book is a great point of departure and for the Kafka fan, both new and seasoned this is a great book to own.
Including the famous Kafka shorts like the "Metamorphosis", "the Penal Colony" and "the Judgment" this book also contains some very short works that I would say are more indicative of his style including "Conversations With a Drunk" and "Conversations With a Worshipper". Some of these stories are so short that they barely span half of a written page and while they are arguably too short I suggest reading them first. Though some might read like a sucker punch by beginning and ending before you realize what occurred, these works will elucidate Kafka's style quicker than the longer shorts. If "The Trial" of "Amerika" is required reading (for students) or even if you have to read "
The Metamorphosis" take some time and read some of these very short stories first, not only will you have a far better command of Kafka's style but you will sound more intelligent in your classroom discussions and your literary analysis when you refer to other works by the author. For the pleasure reader set you can follow this same advice as spending mere moments to read these works will only enrich the experience of reading Kafka's Larger works.
Saving Literary analysis for another forum, I will go straight to the point of recommending this set of stories as the finest example of a Kafka shorts collection. Anyone who knows me well will know that I find the short story to be among the most enjoyable literary forms and that I have read more than my share of Kafka. This collection not only provides the most stories but presents them in a well thought out manner by including the very short stories in a section of their own. Since, undoubtedly, you will be reading this book often it is good to know that this a sturdy paperback that will sustain a great deal of abuse. I recommend that even if you don't buy this version read the stories, however if you are in the market for a Kafka short collection this is the one to buy. At a little over ten dollars you can't go wrong... Enjoy!
-- Ted Murena
Book Review: His Basic Short Story Collection
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a collection which first appeared about 60 years ago and has been published a number of times with small variations in the selected works.
Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. He was a Jew living in Prague and working for the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He wrote in his spare time and was inspired by the problems associated with bureaucratic institutions - such as we read in "The Castle."
I read all of Kafka's work and put together this Listmania list from my notes and experiences. His short novella Metamorphosis is among the best short works ever written. Unfortunately, he did not write and publish much when he was alive. Most of what is available was published after his early death, and some of it is edited (possibly) poorly as in Amerika. His writings vary from novels to one page impressions of life, such as one essay that is about looking out a window. The novels revolve around a young to middle aged protagonist male named "K," who battles the courts and bureaucrats.
At some point while reading his works, I realized that his short stories are just as important as the novels, or even more so, and Metamorphosis is just one of a number of excellent short works involving compulsion and one's view of life. So, the present book is an excellent buy for those who want to learn about Kafka.
Overall, I like "Metamorphosis" for its originality. After reading many of his works I got to the point where I had read enough, because many of his writings are just fragments. Some might want to read all his sort stories in one go, but I did not because of all the fragments. In any case, this collection with a forward by Updike is an excellent buy or read, well worth the time. The following short stores are complete works and not fragments: Hunger Artist, A Country Doctor, A Little Woman, The Penal Colony, and the Judgment. The Penal Colony goes even farther than Metamorphosis; and as such, it is an odd reading experience, having almost a nightmare quality to the story. A few of the others are bizarre as well. In any case, an English reader will always wonder if he completely understands or has fully appreciated the translated German writing.
This is recommended as a basic introduction. It is missing The Stoker but it has his key short works.
Book Review: Hooray for K.
Summary: 5 Stars
Kafka's fiction occupies a strange, unique place in the canon. It is so deep as to invite a world of interpretation, yet so mysterious as to defy any attempts at interpreting it. I think it's brilliant just for its imagery -- who can forget the monstrous execution device of "In the Penal Colony," or the description of the boy's festering wound in "A Country Doctor," or the bouncing balls that torment the protagonist of "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor," or the dead, river-bound title character of "The Hunter Gracchus" who is lost in limbo between this world and the next, or the animalistic recluse of a man obsessed with defending his home from intruders, both real and imaginary, in "The Burrow"? Kafka's use of symbolism, especially his use of animals as symbols representing various types of human experience, is unparalleled; it's easy to see the enormous influence he had on writers as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O'Connor.But I don't feel Kafka's goal was to shock his readers or influence future generations of writers. He was just a 9-to-5 insurance guy with unique outlooks on life and the world and who developed an original, if occasionally grim and morbid, language for expressing them. If a writer's fiction is supposed to reflect his personality, then in Kafka's case we get a distinct picture of a man who struggled every day of his life with his efforts to write, his alienation from his family ("The Metamorphosis"), his difficult relationship with his father ("The Judgment"), his religious feelings, his Jewish identity ("Josephine the Singer," of particular poignancy coming from someone whose sisters were later to die in the concentration camps), his victim status ("The Vulture"), the absurdity of being an artist trying to communicate with an apathetic or misunderstanding public ("A Hunger Artist"), man's search for the divine and order in the universe ("Investigations of a Dog").
From a technical standpoint, it must be stated that Kafka was not a perfect writer; many of the stories are structurally flawed and seem inexplicably truncated or unnecessarily lengthened. Ascribing the shortcomings to expressionistic recklessness, however, I'd rather focus on the dark beauty of the images, even though I don't expect to understand them any better than I could know the man himself.
Book Review: Since no one else has been willing I'll play devil's advocate
Summary: 1 Stars
Franz Kafka was born into a Jewish middleclass family in Prague in July 1883 and succumbed to Tuberculosis in June of 1924. Much of his literary work was published posthumously is reported to be amongst the most influential in Western Literature for it's time. Much of the work is reported to be incomplete and the larger portion of it is collected in this book "The Complete Stories".
In the interest of full disclosure I did not finish the whole book. To be honest I couldn't bear to read another page of it. I know many will say that I cant give a complete review because of this but I am only giving my opinion of what I read which was all similar in one form or fashion so I am operating under the assumption the I would have found all of the stories I left unread as unbearable as those I did read. If you think there is a story I should have read let me know. Before going any further I would say that according to the pros (which I am not), Kafka's writing is of great academic value which I do not dispute. The problem is that this didn't translate into enjoyable reading for me.
The Good: According to the critics and those of the academic community the good is practically limitless. Unfortunately for me I couldn't find any of it.
The Bad: I just didn't enjoy a single moment that I spent with my nose in this book. The stories I read were boring and full of uninteresting characters, subject matter and plot-less storylines that tended to meander everywhere and go nowhere. To top that off the characters were generally placed in bad situations with no hope of a positive outcome and a lack of desire to look for one. The stories and characters are basically just overly morose and depressing. I slogged on this for as long as I could but found myself constantly wondering why I was reading it since I was enjoying none of it.
Overall: Academic value = 5 stars. Enjoyment reading = 1 star and since I read for enjoyment 1 star overall. If you want to enjoy what you read you may want to try reading something else.