Blue Octavo Notebooks (Paperback)

by Franz Kafka (Author), Max Brod (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
prose fragments/aphorisms, tr Kaiser & Wilkins

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Exact Change (January 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878972049
• ISBN-13: 978-1878972040
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #326,541 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kafka thinking out loud, May 27, 2005

By	Erica Bell (Washington State) - See all my reviews

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.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Everyone Can See the Truth, But He Can Be It, January 30, 2000

By	Michael (Rochester, NY) - See all my reviews

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable, July 20, 2000

By A Customer

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!