Customer Reviews

Parables and Paradoxes (Bilingual Edition) (English and German Edition)

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The essence of Kafka is in these parables and paradoxes. In these short pieces many of them excerpts from longer walks we can feel the heart of his puzzling, mysterious, unique genius. Also in them we feel the way Kafka makes of a seemingly abstract argument a mystery story . There are parables on many different subjects, from Quixote and Sancho, to the Great Wall of China, and from Prometheus and the Vulture, to the Parable itself. Often there are variants of the parable and variants of the paradox and Kafka makes us feel not simply how elusive a single definition of a reality can be, but how wonderous and strange it can be also.
Of course in Kafka there is also dread , anxiety and a whole sense of the world as being somehow stranger than we can think or even imagine .Even the everyday details of life which Kafka is so much a master of making into parables of poetic beauty turn mysteriously into something else which we cannot really hold in mind or finally define.
Who reads this book reads a work of genius, the condensed essence of one of mankind's most original literary minds.
What a pleasure what a wonder what a dream.

The pieces here were posthumously gathered from Kafka's notebooks, diaries, letters, and short fictional works. Though generally short, they do seem to go remarkably well together. The pieces are arranged in 4 broad sections: the imperial area including the Great Wall and The Tower of Babel. ("If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted."). There is a section that is Midrashic on the Older testament ("We are fashioned to live in Paradise, and Paradise was destined to serve us)". A favorite of mine was "The Animal in the Synagogue", though what the animal may symbolize is open for discussion. The section on the Greeks, introduces Poseidon, who has become a bureaucrat, checking "the last row of figures." And "Leopards in the Temple" presents another animal in another temple ... and "becomes part of the ceremony". The final section includes unrelated fragments such as "The invention of the devil" and "The truth about Sancho Panza". I found these pieces all heavy in irony and paradox, speaking of a wonderful and mysterious world, without some of the darkness of his longer work
Readers who enjoyed this would also enjoy Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges.

Too bad this book is out of print. All of the stories are on the short side so it is nice to peruse when one does not have a whole lot of time to read but wants something stimulating. Sometimes they are only a page or so long but will leave you thinking about them for a few minutes - this book really engages the reader and encourages mental activity. I think Kafka's mysterious style is quite excellent, and I encourage anyone who has liked his other works to give tthis lesser known collection a chance

Amusement is likely to be the aim of most people who read this book, but those who can appreciate a deeper side, in those moments when our relationship with reality is in bad shape, might also study this book as a higher intellectual calling. If intellectuals in modern society have lost the high standing that they had when intellectuals could be expected to support basic norms, it might be due to their ability to identify with the level of mental acivity evident in this book more readily than with the norms of a society in which people desparately need to believe that they are being understood. First, I would like to recommend this book to people who would like to do some original thinking in the area of religion. In my own religious history, it was surprising how well I could identify with the Edgar Allan Poe-ness of my nature, whenever ultimate problems needed to be faced. I have come to realize that, for the intellectuals of the world, the works of Edgar Allan Poe are like a collection of worn out American horse feathers compared to the depth which can be imagined by those who read the works of Kafka. I'll vouch for that, too.