Customer Reviews

Dicta and Contradicta

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kraus is almost unknown to Americans, but he was one of the shining social critics of the 20th century. He was the first major debunker of Freudian nonsense. He wrote brilliantly on language, politics, and culture. He was, like all great critics, fearless.

This book is a mixed presentation, including many quotes that seem outdated or inscrutible. It also has the editor's odd and distorted rendering of Kraus.

If you are unfamilair with Kraus you will be better served by Thomas Szasz's "Anti-Freud : Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry."...The Szasz book provides fascinating biographical info about Kraus. Szasz has also nicely translated many of Kraus's pithiest and funniest aphorisms.

This book heralds the emergence of two great minds.
Karl Kraus, who because of his fearless critique of the media, politics, religion, and the other humbugs of the world Hitler & Co. was trying to shove down the world's throat...and Mr. McVity, who not only translates the difficult work of Kraus brilliantly, but provides, in his concluding essay, a history and examination of Kraus and his world, and great insights into those troubling times, whose wake we are still witnessing... but also rises, in his own writing, to such heights and depths as to be truly humbling. And yet I am excited that such a mind might surface in such a time as this...where content nor form offer much to chew on, beyond the official story and the infantile rant.

Share this wondrous book with your friends, but realize it may return dog-eared, pages now sea-foam green in highlighter. Sharing, after all, is a very Krausian thing to do. Karl Kraus donated much of his proceeds to homeless shelters, low-cost housing, Quakers caring for starving tubercular children, and the like. And Kraus shared ideas and art with his friends Brecht, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, Rilke, and others whose greatness is already well-known, perhaps because of their being less a thorn in the side of the system.
As Kraus once said, "Art serves to rinse out our eyes."
But I would also suggest that his, and McVity's, art serves to rinse out our ears as well. Especially since our ears are now filled with the likes of...well...you know! But "Kraus named names." Read all about it! And then imagine random names such as Rush, O'Reilly, and others that miraculously make their way to the top of the list, forgetting perhaps that the list is boogerpasted to the wall of a sandbox. [Head shakes left then right. Repeat.]

I am pleased to give this book 5-stars, but regret that I couldn't give it more. As Lin Yutang once said: "I regard the discovery of one's favorite author as the most critical event in one's intellectual development. There is such a thing as affinity of spirits, and among authors of ancient and modern times, one must try to find an author whose spirit is akin with his own."

I eagerly await the next offerings of this protean mind among us, and urge that he not limit himself to translations, as his own writing is such a pleasure, and translations do take so dreadfully long...

Chicken soup for the spleen!

Damn. And I thought I had a bleak perspective and a cutting cacpcity for quick critical insight- Karl leaves me and everyone else in the dirt. A comedian could quite possibly mine an entire erudite, Dennis Miller-esque routine from this book. Kraus' witticisms are as spot-on today as they were when he edited Die Fackel (The Torch), in Vienna about a century ago.

My only beef- it's a lot of dough for not a lot of tree-gut. I mean 918 aphorisms? these aren't sprawling, long-winded Nietzschian aphorisms. They're quick. And this is a page turner... Ah well, it still gets the 5 for being so damn right!

Hey- if you think people (by and large) are lying, manipulative, weak, dishonest scum- this is a book for you. Great essay by the translator too!

It takes a whole lot of courage to translate the works of Karl Kraus. By just about anybody's standards, he is a bigot and a misogynist, but his bile is not without purpose. He reserves most of his barbed comments for women, criticizing their deceptively weak and ultimately treacherous nature, but also praising them for being strong-willed and defiant. Kraus is a vivisectionist, peeling away our comforting hypocrisies and revealing the ugly truths of life. Nothing escapes his knife, not even religion or education. In the pitch darkness of society's lies, Karl Kraus is a light of truth and wisdom. His words may wound tender egos, but they'll become stronger for it.