Customer Reviews

Blue Octavo Notebooks

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4 star:		(2)
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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.

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.

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!

Like the notebooks of Nietzsche, Camus, Andre Gide, and Wittgenstein...
this book of discovered notebooks is a sharp and wonderfully illuminating glimpse into the deep-thinking mind of a master of his literary craft. A Great Read!

When I first bought this book, it wasn't blue either. But when I brought it home and put it on my shelf, things changed irrevocably. Now when I am sitting and writing late in the evening, out of the corner of my eye I can see the book, sitting amongst its faithless companions, gleaming blue like a blue lamp from a lighthouse, shining out from its shelf. While all around the rustling of the mice. But then, when I turn and look straight at her, she isn't blue anymore.

I find the thought almost unbearable.

To face the prospect of religion without religion.
To face the prospect of death head on.
To be truly fearless in the face of human terror, folly, and weakness.

To scribble all this courage into a modest little notebook, without the need for fame or immortality, without the pretense of literature or art.

Just a great man working through the miracle of his life.
It takes courage just to read it.

But read the reviews, it is true, the gentleman from Ontario is priceless, and I agree with Erica as well. I've read the two-volume edition of his diaries and they seem to be much more touching and emotional -- sensitive to beauty -- than most of his published work. Though I would say the published work is also funny, "Investigations of a dog," for example. I think the diaries give a good, new angle on the published work. And I don't think they were "written for publication."

This excerpt of Kafka's journals is incredibly deep, profound, thoughtful, etc. Although it was a little hard to understand in some parts, you are simply taken into a great world, with Kafka's thoughts. This was actually my first writings of Kafka to read, and I am looking forward to his longer journals and fiction works.

Kafka is certainly a good writer, I think. But there is only one thing I can't understand: This book is not Blue. I have no problem with its color, but I was expecting something blue which would fit nicely on my shelf. It is most probably a minor point. But I think we can say of it: How can we Believe anything in this Book if it lies to us about its Cover?