Franz Kafka – his greatest works
stories, novels, diaries
Beginners should start with the short stories before tackling the novels. Be prepared for writing which can be very philosophical, heavily symbolic, and full of strange images. There is often no plot or dramatic tension, but the prose style (even in translation) is truly original. Kafka’s work is also full of black humour; he writes both about and from the point of view of animals; and some of his shorter pieces are in the form of parables, meditations, poetic fragments, and sketches.
Keep in mind that Kafka was one of many great writers who did not win the Nobel Prize for literature – along with Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. His work was hardly known outside his native Chzeckoslovakia during his lifetime, and yet it had immediate and enormous impact once it was translated in the late 1920s.
Metamorphosis is often the title story in most collections of the short stories. It is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies with a rotting apple lodged in his side. This collection also includes K’s other masterly uses of the short story form – ‘The Judgement’ (which he wrote in a single night) and ‘In the Penal Colony’ – the story which predicted the horrors of the concentration camps. It also includes his first published work, which is a series of what he calls ‘Meditations’, plus the forty page ‘Letter to his Father’ which seeks to unravel the complex psychological relationship between them (and which in typically neurotic fashion, Kafka never sent). These are now regarded as modern classics of the short story form – even though some of them have very little ’story’ in the conventional sense.
Full review of Metamorphosis
The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. the protagonist Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism. Read the stories and The Trial as a start and a minimum.
Full review of The Trial
The Trial – DVD film adaptation Orson Welles worked for years to bring this much under-rated adaptation to screen – and his persistence was justified. It is a faithful dramatisation of the novel which captures perfectly the brooding, nightmarish world of the original. Much of it was filmed in the old French government buildings of the Quai d’Orsay before it was transformed into the present museum. A young Anthony Perkins gives a superb, haunting performance as the angst-ridden protagonist, Joseph K. The rest of the cast features female icons from the 1960s including Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, and Romy Schneider. Welles’ favorite actor Akim Tamiroff is also on hand, and Welles himself plays the Advocate. This is a film which is very faithful to the original novel.
The Castle is Kafka’s last work – a long, rambling, and unfinished novel in which the castle itself operates as a huge metaphor for authority and bureaucracy. The protagonist K spends the entire novel in a fruitless search for access. If The Trial is about a hopeless search for justice, The Castle is often said to be about the search for grace and forgiveness. It lies like a magnificent ruin amongst the many other fragments in Kafka’s oeuvre. This is strictly for the advanced devotee. Tackle this one only when you have read the other works.
Full review of The Trial
Amerika is Kafka’s first novel, Although he is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). Deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.
The Complete Novels is a handy, good value compilation which includes Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle. One Amazon reviewer complains that the print is very small, but you can hardly complain when three major works are rolled into one for less than the price of two cocktails.
The Complete Short Stories is another amazing bargain, because this includes not only the stories, but also Kafka’s fragments, parables, and sketches. Many of these – although sometimes no more than jottings – contain the germs of ideas and images which Kafka worked up later into his major works. Together they reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. Some are well-known, others are mere jottings, observations of daily life, given artistic form through Kafka’s unique perception of the world.
The Diaries Kafka wrote to himself almost as much as he did to other people, and he communicated some of his most subtle and revealing ideas in fragments and notes made in the margins of his tormented life. Here there are the wrestlings with guilt and personal inadequacy, plus the aspirations to a a higher spiritual life. They cover the period from 1910 to 1923 and reveal the inner world in which he lived. He also describes the father he worshipped and the woman he loved but could not bring himself to marry. It is sometimes difficult to see where his fiction ends and his biographical notes begin, but they form an interesting contrast if they are read in conjunction with the letters and the notebooks. They also need to be read with care, because they conceal almost as much as they reveal.
Letters to Felice Many of Kafka’s surviving letters were written to a woman with whom he was ‘in love’. The qualification of this term is necessary because they reveal a fascinating ambiguity in his attitude to the recipient, Felice Bauer. Thousands of words are spent analysing his feelings, arranging meetings then cancelling them, deciding to get married and making all the necessary arrangements for where and how to live – and then changing his mind . They also reveal his painstaking sympathy and scrupulous kindness to friends, his neurotic fastidiousness over what most people would regard as trivialities, and his amazing modesty in dealing with other figures of the literary world.
Franz Kafka: Illustrated Life is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. An excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.
Kafka: A Very Short Introduction introduces Kafka’s life and cultural background, then traces a number of themes in his best-known works. It’s in an interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index. If you’ve not studied Kafka before, this will give you pointers on what to look for. It covers Kafka’s biography, then interpretations of his work – including one quite original approach concerning the relationship between his writing and his body.
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