The Complete Stories
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The Complete Stories
Franz Kafka
Literature
James Mustich
Jul 28, 2018
Anatomizing the absurdity of modern life through ever more bizarre situations and ironies, Kafka’s tales have a force out of all proportion to their small scale (one, the cat-and-mouse story “A Little Fable,” is just three sentences long). Yet within their deceptive dimensions, they seem to move elemental psychological states—guilt, fear, unknowing—around a symbolic chessboard in a game whose rules we don’t quite understand, but whose stakes are clearly high. Although the stories can be read as a unit, several have gained fame on their own. The most famous of the stories, surely, is “The Metamorphosis,” an early effort; written in 1912, it’s among the few works Kafka saw published during his lifetime. In it, as in all of Kafka’s work, the incomprehensible and the absurd are taken at face value—as if to remind us that his bizarre inventions are not escapes from the world we live in, but cracked mirrors that reflect the fathomless depths that lurk behind the surfaces of everyday experience.
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Eli
Jan 29
Must read!
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