Customer Reviews

Franz Kafka The Complete Stories

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Kafka has to be the one of the most influential writers of the century, not just for his ability to capture the alienation and unreality of much of modern life but because his vision, which is simultaneously totally bizarre and strangely moving, freed writers to try more and more daring ways of expressing themselves. After all, if one can write a moving story about a man who wakes one morning to discover that he has been turned into a huge cockroach, what can't the writer do?

The impression left by these stories is all the more interesting when one realizes that Kafka wasn't a starving, drug or drink demented artist, but a minor clerk in a German insurance firm. A dull and orderly life. Of course, if you've ever worked for an insurance company Kafka's sense of unreality and alienation might seem natural.

These are unique and wonderful concoctions. Anyone who wonders what 'Kafkaesque' really means should take a peek into his world. These stories are the best place to start. Then on to The Trial for the full, gruely experience. Wonderfully horrible.

"The Complete Stories" has everything the beginning Kafka reader neads to get started. Of course this is required reading for the Kafka enthusiast.

A well thought-out forward by John Updike prepares you for your journey into the amazing and complex mind of Kafka. The book is divided into two sections, one for the longer stories and one for the shorter stories (most of which only take up a page or two).

The stories themselves are great. "The Metamorphisis" is included, in which Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself in the form of a rather large insect! "The Penal Colony", "The Judgment" and "A Country Doctor" are also included.

There's certainly hasn't been an author since Kafka able to play upon the fears and emotions of the human mind, those thoughts playing in out head, when we realize that maybe some of this could happen to us.

If you enjoy "The Complete Stories", be sure to pick up "Amerika", "The Castle" and "The Trial". These are Kafka's three novels and will complete your collection. All very much worth it!

Let me preface this very negative review with this: I love Kafka. He's a great author and the shortcomings of this book, this book in particular, are not his.

That said, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK! Whatever archaic methods the publisher, Schocken, uses to bind its books is in desperate need of revitalization. Within 1 week of purchasing this book it was threatening to fall to pieces. Within 2 weeks it became 4 volumes--it yet threatens to break into a weekly series.

If you enjoy breaking the binding on your paperbacks for easy reading beware, this book is poorly bound and breaking the binding, or even opening it much past 180 degrees, will cause the book to break asunder.

Buy these stories, just don't buy them in this book. Look elsewhere even if you must buy 2 or 3 other books to get everything.

Kafka was perhaps the greatest writer ever to live and this volume shows it. Every story, even every sketch of an idea that Kafka wrote down comes filled with brilliant emotions and deep meaning conveyed through simple and serious language. Shakespeare has none of the lyrical abilities of Kafka, and Homer could only dream of equaling Kafka's mastery of plot. Kafka out-psychoanalyzed Freud, and wrote circles around Joyce. His stories seem modern even by today's standards, the things that haven't come true yet in his works I believe will eventually, while I don't believe him to be a prophet he certainly had a great understanding of humankind and knew where it was headed.

"A Country Doctor" is in my opinion the greatest short story ever written, a dark dream sequence with all kinds of slimy worms writhing beneath the surreal surface plot, sticking out through the rotted boards that Kafka puts down to allow us to see what we're standing over. "The Judgement," a purely perfect work of psychology, Kafka dipping deeper and hitting more nerves than in any of his other stories, giving us a picture of what it's like to be a genius controlled by a domineering, and a nonunderstanding father. And of course there are the smaller works from "Meditations," little snippets of images that flash through the mind, a kind of literary whispering in the ear while sitting in the dark. "The Burrow," another favorite, perhaps the most claustrophobic work of fiction ever conceived, the darkness of the tunnel affecting your mind for days.

Read this book, in it the greatest treasure a writer ever gave us shines, a golden nugget, hidden deep within a dark pool that seems unswimable. Take the swim, and I garantee that you will find the nugget. Ignoring Kafka is like denying yourself the best there is.

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.

Until you read Kafka, many of us think we know Kafka based perhaps on anecdotal items we pick up in the media or from others. The mere fact there's the term "Kafkaesque" perhaps causes us to think we know what it means. But it is only when one reads Kafka do you begin to gain some insight into one of the most mysterious and yet hallowed writers of the 20th century.

This volume is really the place to begin. For in it are three of his more widely known novellas: In the Penal Colony, The Judgement, and Metamorphosis. But it is with the other stories that the reader that peruses rather than skims will undoubtedly begin to ask questions. What is Kafka trying to say in such a circuitous manner? What conflict tears at him to write these unusual tales? Because I think most readers will begin to wonder the same, realizing that Kafka felt passionate about something, but chose a metaphoric manner to present his idea so ingenious and subtle that I fear it is lost upon most readers. Clearly, Kafka struggled with something deeply personal. He was engaged twice to the same woman, and called off the engagement twice. And he prefered to live an uneventful, unnoticeable and undemanding life. He ridiculed the bureaucry, yet chose it as his vocation. To me, that is a key element to understanding his stories. And these more obscure tales do more to reveal what is meant by "Kafkaesque" than the grandiose volumes of The Castle, or Amerika. It is clear why so many of his prose strikes one as unfinished (besides the fact most of it was unfinished), because Kafka's own metamorphosis was incomplete. Had he not died from tuberculosis, perhaps he would have solved the conundrum of his personal life. Instead, we are left with these beautiful and mysterious tales that whisper something to us.

As a student of the German language, I must say that I view this text from a different perspective than most of its other readers. I selected this book merely to give me a broader understanding of Kafka's work in the short time available to me. It is an infinitely useful resource, gracefully translated and sturdily bound. I give it four stars simply because no English translation could possibly compare to the original German texts. For example, the German word "Gesetz" is translated "law" in the foundational parable "Before the Law." Though it is a literally accurate term, it does not capture the sense of the Gesetz as a semi-personal metaphysical absolute concerning the condition of the Universe. ("Gesetz" is something of a German equivalent for the Greek "Logos" with a capital "L".) Such slight aberrations are certainly common as they are an ineluctable consequence of translation; this aside, it is an excellent text that will always sit next to my German edition on the shelf of Modern Literature.

A Review of the Amazon Page:

I'm reviewing neither the author nor the book but am reviewing the Amazon page for this book. The main question that I have after looking at this page is this: "what the hell is in this book?"

The product description reads as follows: "The only available collection that brings together all of Kafka's stories--those published during his lifetime and those released after his death." Why offer such cryptic and misleading descriptions of what is in this book? Why not just be upfront and list the contents of the book? I have no clue what's in it. Does it have "The Trial" and "The Castle"? Or is it just his short-stories? If so, which ones?

If you want customers to feel confident in purchasing books online, please be upfront about the contents of the book. Otherwise, how do you hope to compete with a bookstore where I can browse through the physical pages of the book before purchase?

Kafka can be a difficult figure to approach for some. His presence looms for some readers as foreboding as that strange unapproachable structure in The Castle looms for the character in that book. One way to get around this is to learn a little about Kafka's own life, especially his relationship with his father. And also to learn that his economical & concise way with language he learned as a student of law and his fascination to the point of paranoia with bureaucracies of various kinds he may have picked up in his career as an office worker in an insurance company. Kafka may never become all together human to some readers. To those who share his particular temperament, however, he will seem very human and become a favorite though a kind of quiet one that lurks in the fringes of your bookcase. These stories are a great introduction. Though they are all prose works in some cases they seem to possess qualities more often seen in parables than in twentieth-century prose ie: use of symbols & layers of possible meanings being more evocative(though sparse) than specific. His work is certainly pessimistic, his landscapes are oblique, and chances are you will have your own way of looking at Kafka the more you read(and there are a vast array of ways to interpret his work). One interesting reader, Jean Paul Sartre, characterized Kafka's work as "the impossibility of transcendence". His exaggerated worlds(Swift was one of his own favorite authors) do provide interesting glimpses into that very often written about terrain alienation but few have ever delved into it so deeply. After Kafka you may be lead down one of the more interesting paths in the history of literature which includes Nabokov, Borges, Cortazar, Calvino and many many others.

It's hard to fit a review of any of Kafka's work in such a short space, but especially a review of his short fiction (or rather parables, which is more what they are). He was a master of the short story, the likes of which we have seldom seen before or since. This volume contains most of his short stories, those that aren't included here are included elsewhere, where they are more fitting (such as "The Stoker" as the first chapter of Amerika). Kafka's short story "The Metamorphosis" is possibly the best short story ever written. It is certainly the most well known. But I'd like to draw your attention to a few other stories by him--examples of what makes Kafka great: "Before the Law", "In the Penal Colony", "A Country Doctor", "A Report to an Academy", "A Hunger Artist", "The Burrow", "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk", and "Jackals and Arabs." Read this book.