Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The essence of Kafka is here , October 16, 2004
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.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Paradoxes of Older Testament, Greeks, and Imperial Era, December 15, 2008
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
From Kafka to Kafka there is no one like Kafka, July 14, 2004
These short pieces often excerpts from the longer works concentrate the essence of this dazzling most unique of minds, whose enigmatic questioning and trembling anxiety nonetheless behold and present the world with awesome uncanny beauty. In these little pieces we go to the heart of the Kafka riddle understanding that no paradox is ultimately paradoxical enough, or no parable parable- like enough to fully contain this mind.
If Genius is uniqueness then Kafka is the quintessential Genius, if Greatness is paradox and parable then Kafka is alone in the stars.
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