Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)

A little Kafka goes a long way. I put this book down, actually returned it to the library, without finishing it. In addition to his "classics" there are many short stories, almost notes, some only a page long. This edition has a good introduction and a chronology as well as the requisite

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bibliography. It's a book I'd like to have on my bookshelf for when I feel the need for a "Kafka moment."

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As with any set of collected stories, the quality in this volume is uneven, but in this collection, the highs are very high indeed. The classic stories, "The Judgment, "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," "A Report to the Academy" and "The Hunger Artist" are all highlights. Each is a

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powerful combination of Kafka's riveting style and his insight into character.

It is this insight which also makes so many of the other stories in this volume worth your time. Kafka is able, with great skill, to enter into the minds of others, whether they be of people (the unfinished but fascinating "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor"), humans losing humanity ("The Metamorphosis") or other creatures ("The Burrow"). Even the many short stories of only a page or two work so well because they give you interesting descriptions of characters or scenes that prime the creative pump, so to speak.

Many of these shorter stories are probably best read in short bursts, or one at a time. I read through the entire collection, and so many of these stories blended together as I moved from one to the other, and this was not, I think in retrospect, the best way to approach them.

As noted at the outset, though, the quality is uneven. Some of the unpublished works are unfinished, and are of varying quality. While there might be much in "Description of a Struggle" or "Wedding Preparations in the Country" for a Kafka scholar, I am neither, and I found both the prose and story in these entries to be a struggle without the same reward. These stories are probably best approached with a critical eye towards Kafka's development as a writer and storyteller.

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In the worlds that Kafka creates, cause and effect tend to have been tossed out the window. Actions and reactions don’t link together as neatly as we think they should, and when a connection does become apparent it’s often only in retrospect. In many of Kafka’s works the rules aren’t clear,

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and often are made even more opaque by the end of the story. By furthermore keeping references to the real world to a minimum in his work, Kafka severs our tether to reality and sets us adrift in what is sometimes a dreamlike, sometimes a nightmarish reality that nevertheless casts a dark reflection of our modern world. It’s little wonder that Kafka was so influential to the authors that followed him, and that he continues to be heavily influential today: as the world gets more complex, the bureaucracies of life become more ubiquitous, and outsider status remains just as prevalent as ever, Kafka’s stories resonate all the more.

So bottom line, Kafka is worth reading, but stepping away from that broad overview of his work and influence and looking at his specific works, the question of “what Kafka should I read” is a harder one. There’s nary a story he wrote that doesn’t evoke his signature feeling of disorientation, but that’s not to say that all of them are very good. After having read his complete collected stories, I’ve concluded that much of what Kafka wrote that was unpublished during his lifetime went unpublished for good reason, as some of it is quite bad. Description of a Struggle is nearly incomprehensible, Wedding Preparations in the Country is so fragmented that it’s rendered meaningless, The Burrow just keeps going and going long after you’ve gotten the point. There are some gems in there- I quite enjoyed Poseidon- but in general Kafka’s unpublished works are a big step down from what he published. In terms of what he had published, much of what Kafka wrote is so short that it lacks the impact found in his longer works. You’re following Kafka down the rabbit hole, after all, and if the journey stops after it’s barely begun it undercuts the point. Again, some of his shorter works are excellent (Before the Law and An Imperial Message come to mind, the latter clearly showing how much Kafka influenced Borges), and even the ones that aren’t excellent are often interesting (such as Eleven Sons, where Kafka establishes a cast sans a story), but they aren’t his best works.

Instead, Kafka’s best are his longer short stories and novellas, which are lengthy enough for you to be completely submerged in the atmosphere of Kafka’s world, but not long enough that the effect of the constant disorientation dulls (a problem I think The Castle suffers from). The Metamorphosis is the ultimate story of alienation and “otherness,” regardless of what exactly that consists of. The Trial is a brilliant story of society and institutions functioning outside of our comprehension, let alone our control, but still inexorably having a major impact on our lives. In The Penal Colony, my favorite of Kafka’s works, is about how people can buy into the mission of bureaucracies, even when those bureaucracies are doing horrible things, and can come to champion the mission and action of those bureaucracies even when they should long ago have ceased. A Hunger Artist presents the artistic drive to create as, not something to praise, but a necessary part of an artist- they must create, they could never do anything else. These are all the briefest of descriptions, as you could analyze any of these stories forever and a day, but the takeaway is that they are all different and all excellent. Together these works are essential reading for understanding how literature developed after Kafka, and more importantly they are excellent in their own right. You should read these. If you liked them, you should read the rest of Kafka’s published works. If you finish those and are still hungering for more, then you should move on to his unpublished material.

This leaves the question of how to grade a collection like this, that contains many of Kafka’s best works (though sadly not The Trial), but also contains his worst. If I were to grade every story contained in this collection the average would probably be a 3/5, but this collection gets a 4/5 because with Kafka, his best sticks with you, and his worst are just troubled dreams you forget upon waking from them.

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