- Collected Stories by Franz Kafka (Everyman's Library). I decided to begin with the stories, because they say that's how you really get to know Kafka, although I was reluctant. I don't love short stories and tend to avoid collections of them. The edition I found at the library includes 41 stories published in his lifetime and 43 published by his friend Max Brod after Kafka's death. The "stories" range from a single paragraph to more than 50 pages long. Some of them aren't really stories, they're just brief weird descriptions. But the actual stories are pretty weird too. I was surprised to find that I really liked them. After I'd read a few I thought, I'm enjoying myself. I didn't have to push myself to read them, I wanted to read them. The unpublished stories weren't as good -- presumably hadn't been revised as much, plus Kafka hadn't chosen them to be published -- but I liked some of them.
I didn't like his long, later animal stories: "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; "Investigations of a Dog"; "The Burrow." But I loved some of the others. "The Metamorphosis" is better and sadder than I remembered. "In the Penal Colony" is chilling. "A Country Doctor" is amazing, as are many of the stories that were published with it. And among the unpublished stories I loved "The Proclamation." It's just a few paragraphs, a page and a half. In a tenement building, someone distributes a strange "proclamation" that encourages people to come and borrow some of his five broken toy rifles so they can join together in some sort of unexplained protest. But as the narrator of the story says,"Nobody in our house has the time or the wish to read proclamations, let alone to think them over. Before long the little sheets of paper were floating in the current of filth that, starting from the attics and fed by all the corridors, pours down the staircase and there struggles with the opposing current that swirls up from below."
Eventually there is another proclamation which states that nobody has responded to the first proclamation. And that's the end of the story. Positively Kafkaesque. - The Trial (1925). Kafka didn't publish any novels while he was alive, but this is one of three that were published posthumously. It took me a while to get into it, but once I did, I enjoyed it. The thing about Kafka that I never understood before is that he's funny. I thought this would be a depressing book, but it isn't, even though the main character, Joseph K., gets into a terrible situation, apparently through no fault of his own. We, and he, never learn what he has been accused of, nor how the mechanism of his trial is proceeding, while at the same time, everyone he meets seems to know something about "his case" already.
The whole story reads like a bad dream, with some parts more dreamlike than others. For instance, after he is "arrested," he is allowed to continue with his normal life, living in a sort of rooming house and working at a bank. Then he is summoned to his first "interrogation," his first official meeting in court (weirdly, in a tenement building), but he is not told what time it will be held, nor where in the tenement building it will take place. He finally finds the court in session on the fifth floor, but the "interrogation" is soon interrupted by a sexual assault taking place in the corner. A few days later he is working late at the bank when he hears "convulsive sighs" coming from a storeroom. He opens the door and finds the two men who "arrested" him, being whipped by a third man. The next day he looks in the storeroom again and they are still there. So bizarre.
I decided not to go on and read The Castle this month. I could have, but I think I got a good dose of Kafka from these two books. I also think I might someday read it on my own, because now I know that Kafka is fun. Who would have thought? It was as much of a surprise as when I read Moby-Dick a few years ago and loved it. I also want to find a copy of the stories for my collection, but I'm just going to watch out for them, not buy them from Amazon.
Other reading...
After finishing Kafka's short stories, I took a break and read Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, which finally arrived at the library. I updated my September reading post to reflect that. Very good book. She should write more nonfiction.
I also read some spooky books.
- Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay was OK, although most of the spookiness was early in the book.
- The latest Phil Rickman novel, The Fever of the World, was just terrible and not spooky at all.
- The graphic novel version of Took: A Ghost Story, Mary Downing Hahn's middle grade novel, was very nicely done, quite spooky.
- The Silence of the Sea by Yrsa Sigurdardottir was not really a ghost story, just a few ghostly bits. It was OK.
- And finally, on October 31st I read the last story in The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, edited by J. A. Cuddon. Reading that all month was a fun project, though most of the stories were not that scary. Some were!
October is supposed to be the month to read books from the tall bookcase by the front door, but I just didn't get to any.
In November I need another woman writer and after a great deal of deliberation I've chosen Louise Erdrich. I've already read several books by her (7 according to my master list), but she's written so many that I still have about 26 others to choose from. Reading books about Indians seems to fit with November -- because of Thanksgiving, I guess, and also somehow because of Election Day, and Veterans Day, and because it's kind of a sad time of year. So that'll be November, and I'm also going to try to read a biography of Herbert Hoover. And whatever else comes up.
No comments:
Post a Comment