The 3 best books by the infumable Kafka

Sometimes a specific work (literary in this case) does the author a disservice. The excessive weighting of Metamorphosis as a masterpiece it must have meant the weight of a slab on the good of Franz (something similar must have happened to Salinger with The catcher in the rye, more myth than anything else).

Thus, Kafka, considered by himself as an average author (not mediocre), ended his days thinking that many of his unpublished works should never be published. History took care to label his work as "very personal" or "different", well, I will not be the one who takes the opposite of History.

What I will not deny is that I partly agree with this idea of ​​mediocrity typical of what Kafka wrote. In many cases we speak, so to speak, of superfluous or inconsequential literature according to the guidelines set by critics and the rest.

However, the official significance of Kafka has led many readers around the world on the trail of his immortal Metamorphosis and some other books, which in the end, YES were published.

However, if you are very convinced of the worth of this author, and before determining my ranking of his books, you can get all of his work in a luxury case for any self-respecting library, available below:

All that said, in summary, I am going to name those three best Kafka books, or at least the ones that gave me a salvageable impression.

Kafka's (more or less) recommended books

The process

Quite above the Metamorphosis in terms of a social and political component of the moment lived by Kafka. The process is among the few works of literature that have achieved the rare destiny of vastly exceeding the mere limits of its nature as a story.

Indeed, in this novel that begins with the arrest, one morning, of Josef K., allegedly accused of a crime that he will never know, and who from that moment is involved in an inextricable tangle governed by a mechanism Omnipresent and all-powerful whose reasons and purposes are inscrutable, Franz Kafka forged a powerful metaphor for the condition of modern man. Max Brod, friend, editor and literary executor of Kafka after his death, learned of the work in 1914, as Kafka, according to his custom, read some passages to him.

From the first moment he was fascinated by the power of the story, so he insisted, as on other occasions, that it be published, against the usual reluctance of its author.

After Kafka's premature death from tuberculosis in 1924, and despite the fact that the author had expressed in a note his wish that all his writings be destroyed without being read, Max Brod decided to publish The process years later. This edition collects the full text and the arrangement of Kafka without the expungements and arbitrariness of the first editions of Max Brod.

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La madriguera

Under the surrealistic sieve that governed the work of this author, a new animal personalization (a rodent in this case) brings the perspective of the human being, his complex psyche, his obsessions, his capacity for stubbornness despite reason, all this through an estrangement with a multitude of interpretations.

A new Spanish edition brings into focus one of Franz Kafka's latest texts: beset by tuberculosis, in the midst of hyperinflation, he played in La madriguera the last pieces of his discreet sarcasm, his terrible sensuality, his silences.

La madriguera it contains, perhaps, his most far-reaching prophecy. It was integrated into the posthumous volume Description of a fight by Max Brod, who also gave it a title. In Spanish, this title has been translated as La madrigueraThe constructionThe lair o The work.

The protagonist of this story, a rodent, is the constant architect of an increasingly complex tunnel excavation to which he dedicates his life and all his concerns.

Castle

The kafkaes of pro highlight this work as the most outstanding of the Jewish author. Castle it tells of the unsuccessful attempts of the surveyor K. to gain access to the castle authorities, who apparently has requested their services, and to obtain permission to carry out his work and thus settle in the village where he has been received as an outsider.

With his insistence on claiming his rights, the often comic adventures of the surveyor K. configure an unfathomable parable about the abstruse condition of power and about the difficult feeling of belonging that anguishes modern man.

En Castle, written in the last phase of the author's life, when the disease progressed with desperate tenacity, Kafka's expressive force reaches an unusual intensity, testifying to the author's lack of commitments, to his firm will to face a terrible existential challenge: the «assault on the last earthly frontier»His desire to be«end or beginning».

This maturity and intensity, his extraordinary style, which, as he said Hermann Hesse, make Kafka a secret king of German prose, make the novel Castle a young classic of world literature, a classic that, like The process, has unleashed an avalanche of interpretations and comments, not only literary, but also philosophical, theological, psychological, political and sociological, thus demonstrating that it has touched the nerve of our time.

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4.7/5 - (7 votes)

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