The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka | Franz Kafka

The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka | Franz Kafka | The icy sea within

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The Zürau Aphorism...

	The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka Franz Kafka Schocken, 2006 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century?s most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso.

Illness set him free to write a series of philosophical fragments: some narratives, some single images, some parables. These ?aphorisms? appeared, sometimes with a few words changed, in other writings?some of them as posthumous fragments published only after Kafka?s death in 1924. While working on K., his major book on Kafka, in the Bodleian Library, Roberto Calasso realized that the Zürau aphorisms, each written on a separate slip of very thin paper, numbered but unbound, represented something unique in Kafka?s opus?a work whose form he had created simultaneously with its content.

The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka had intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the collective work of a genius.

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Heroism

Writing about Kafka is just as difficult and always more useless (in the Kafka-esque sense) than reading Kafka. Really the only people who ought to be allowed to write about Kafka are those who live in caves or at the bottom of wells or in high mountain towers and have studied Kafka's work for fifty years. He evades interpretation, as Harold Bloom pointed out, which is another way of saying he is hard to understand.

I think the best way to take these aphorisms is with something like the steely commitment of a scholar-monk in the dark ages piecing together out of rare manuscripts the arcane glories of a past world. The extreme heroism of the writer must summon forth a similar heroism in the reader. One must live with Kafka rather than devour him.

Only a fool would seek to interpret Kafka in an amazon review. I am, of course, a fool so I would suggest that the phrase "The impossibility of spirit" would be not too much more deceptive, partial, or misleading a statement than any other when considering Kafka's work. Certainly for Kafka the spiritual and the political are both present (or absent; one sees what I mean!); great writers like Theodor Adorno are simply wrong to read Kafka as only or primarily a political writer. Both possibilities must be kept in mind.

These days, in literature, Kafka is often made the signatory of many more minor literary projects engaged in by lesser though esteemable writers. It is helpful to return to the reluctant master himself to be aware of life's inextinguishable distances. Kafka wasn't trying to create the "Kafka-esque" or be strange in a way that would appeal to hoardes of white middle class semi-intellectuals. He was trying to set down in clear and readable prose what he thought and what he felt whether he had anything in common with it or not.

Amazon will not permit me to give Mr. Franz Kafka as many stars as I would like. My choices are limited to only five.

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The icy sea within

In April 1917 Kafka went for an eight- month visit at the home of his sister Ottla and her husband in the Bohemian town of Zurau. Shortly after arriving he began to spit blood, the sign that tuberculosis truly had come. According to Calasso's introduction this did not dishearten Kafka but rather liberated him. Calasso says that the eight months in Zurau were the happiest of Kafka's life as they enabled him to be away from the family, the office, the questions of marriage , the areas in life which disturbed him. He could be totally within himself in the realm Calasso says Kafka most at home in.
As a student Calasso came across these aphorisms in original manuscript. He noticed that they were written in an unusual way. Usually Kafka crowded his writing line after line into his notebooks. Here each aphorism was presented on its own on a single page. And this is the way this edition of them presents them, one at a time surrounded by much empty space. As Calasso points out most of Kafka's aphorisms were not what we ordinarily think of as that, though some were close. His aphorisms might be parables, or small narratives. The key is that the few lines they consist in must be seen in isolation surrounded by empty space, so that they can be read in themselves with maximum concentration.
If I recall rightly most of these aphorisms were published in a work of Kafka edited by his friend, Max Brod.
In any case the paradoxical beauty, the tremendous depth of Kafka's thought is found here in these isolated entries. I would take exception to the 'puff of the publisher' that they represent Kafka's 'philosophy'. Kafka was not a philosopher and did not have a philosophy but rather his own way of seeing and thinking about the world, an uncanny remarkable original and hauntingly painful and beautiful way.

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Kafka's Philosophy of Life in 109 Aphorism

This book is a fascinating set of aphorisms that Kafka wrote while retreated from the world and recuperating from tuberculosis. Italian Kafka scholar Roberto Calasso frames the context with an insightful introduction and afterword. The aphorisms have been published much as it is assumed Kafka wanted, each on a separate page. Here is Kafka's philosophy in the raw, and it is fascinating. This is not a book to be devoured, but to be periodically sipped from so that the reader can savor and reflect on each aphorism.

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