On the Complete Stories

First and foremost, Kafka is hard. His style is genuinely tough, and finding any meaning in the stories can be tough too — which may be the point. Nearly all of his writing feels distant and almost analytical, like a lawyer’s brief, which is odd given that the stories are written in the first person; but it lets him draw out the surreality of everyday life, and his work is plainly a literary forerunner of German expressionism. Second, Kafka is funny. The humor isn’t always there in the moment; it’s only when you step back that you find it, as in Gregor Samsa’s first worry on waking up a giant beetle: “I’m late for work!” The stories are funny because we see ourselves in all of them. In “Preparations for a Wedding in the Country,” the narrator hallucinates the possibility of a friend murdering him on the streets of Prague — and which of us hasn’t had that thought about a friend we were walking with late at night? His “as if” constructions add to the comedy: in that same story he describes, to paraphrase, a man “moving his arms up and down, as if lifting a heavy load,” and in “The Metamorphosis,” a man “backing away, as if repelled by pressure from an invisible force.” They sharpen the mental image and the absurdity of it all.

In “In the Penal Colony,” the condemned man doesn’t know the sentence he’s been given, or even that he’s been sentenced at all, and I can’t help laughing — it’s so real. He committed the most minor offense and is handed the gravest possible punishment. Doesn’t life feel like that? We slip up and get slammed across the face with a kiloton of bricks, and then we have to defend ourselves and account for every action. In the short piece “On the Tram,” he writes in legalistic language that he cannot justify why he’s standing on the platform — and who among us can justify our own existence? We always feel we must, and it’s never enough. Kafka seems permanently on trial before the society around him, which I suppose is why he wrote The Trial, and the reason it became so popular is that it resounds with all of us. He was clearly a tortured man, and a lot like all of us moderns; perhaps he’s the writer who best understands the twentieth-century, and early twenty-first-century, condition, and for that alone he’s worth reading. This is a book to come back to later — the first reading will never be enough.