Blue Octavo Notebooks [Paperback]

Franz Kafka (Author), Max Brod (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2004

From late 1917 until June 1919, Franz Kafka ceased to keep a diary, for which he had used quarto-size notebooks, instead writing in a series of smaller, octavo-size notebooks. When Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omitted these notebooks--which include short stories, fragments of stories and other literary writings--because, he wrote, "notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception." The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known and yet are among the most characteristic and brilliantly gnomic of Kafka's work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms within their original context. This edition of the English translation has been corrected with reference to the German text for certain omissions and discrepancies of sequence. Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding." --Library Journal.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Exact Change (January 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878972049
• ISBN-13: 978-1878972040
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kafka thinking out loud, May 27, 2005

By 

Erica Bell (Washington State) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Blue Octavo Notebooks (Paperback)

First off, to the reviewer here from Ontario: I laughed until I started to hiccup while reading your review, and since I'm a substitute librarian, well...you can imagine. You've caught his tone exactly.

Now, the Octavos. If you're a Kafka obsessive, they're required reading---first, to tease out his private code (the aphorisms). Secondly, one finds many of the shorter pieces Brod lifted for other releases, and what Brod chose---and what he left---says a lot about how his friend interpreted this author, and how FK would be misinterpreted for the next fifty years.

Another reason to read Octavos is this: at least two of the shorter pieces here are so funny you'll want to collar friends and force them to listen. "I am a clerk at the town hall!" boasts one of his personae repeatedly...before collapsing into snarls about dignity and the office cat. Another is a wry send-up on the self-important manifestos floating around Europe at the time: Kafka's version is released anonymously to an indifferent apartment population, and proposes an absurdist Social-Contract arrangement between the manifesto writer, the thronging public, and five broken toy rifles--all sonorously written in starving-revolutionary comeradese. Of course, to the manifesto writer's chagrin, no one shows up.

The Octavo Notebooks are where Kafka recorded a few of his most delicate, poetic and aching shorter pieces. They're also where he goofed up, wrote himself into a corner, admonished himself, lied to himself. In short, they're a small window into this complicated writer's heart. Nothing here is so essential that you can't enjoy Kafka's more formal work without them, but if you're a fan, they humanize the man immeasurably.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Everyone Can See the Truth, But He Can Be It, January 30, 2000

By 

Michael (Rochester, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blue Octavo Notebooks (Paperback)

In the last year I have fallen in love with Franz Kafka's writings, starting with "The Trial." His works are the most truthful, soul-searching, endless, funny, and haunting tales ever written. I bought "The Blue Octavo Notebooks" not knowing what to expect. Were these to be second-rate scribblings published only to profit off Kafka's name? Not at all. These journals are as brilliant, if not better, than Kafka's stories. They reveal a complex man who was constantly challenging himself, trying to find the meaning of art, goodness, evil, truth, human nature, the eternal, and life. The entries, many of them only one or two lines, are deep meditations that allow the reader to probe into Kafka's, and the reader's, mind. Even the unfinished story fragments are nuggets of pure genius. The notebooks are intensely mystical, but frighteningly real -- like everything else in the world of Kafka's literature.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable, July 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Blue Octavo Notebooks (Paperback)

Definitely not the first Kafka text one should select--but arguably the second or third (behind The Stories and The Trial.) This collection represents the closest Kafka came to helping the reader unlock the impossibilities of interpretation in his fiction. For this reason alone it's worth a look, though there are many wonderful and hilarious moments that rank with the best of K's work.

And to the gentleman from Ontario (review, Oct. 18/99) who fretted over the color of the volume in question (and the publisher's good faith): you haven't been reading your Kafka. On page 35 you'll find the following: "There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie." This volume's (non) color is Kafkaesque in the best sense of the term. EXACT CHANGE should be congratulated on their superior understanding of a masterful writer!