The Burrow

"The Burrow" consists of fictional pieces written between 1911 and 1924 and not published in Kafka's lifetime. Some are long stories such as 'Investigations of a Dog' and 'The Burrow' whereas others are fragments no longer than a page. Common themes link the stories: more or less familiar beasts (including a creature somewhat like a marten who has inhabited a synagogue for many years and a family heirloom which is half-lamb half-cat), business and bureaucracy (which Hofmann's translation renders chillingly appropriate to today's world of work), and distant but compelling powers and laws.Often Kafka is very funny, whether he's describing a schoolmaster's obsession with a giant mole, a dog's attempts to subject its world to scientific inquiry, or Poseidon stuck in a desk job at the bottom of the ocean. Throughout, the reader wonders at Kafka's imagination and the deadpan way in which he prosecutes the situations he has created. This collection ends with 'The Burrow', an entertaining, sometimes grotesque, account of a creature's obsession with the home of the title, a meat-filled network of tunnels, plazas, and a central citadel, which provides both comfort and paranoia. Hofmann's illuminating introduction describes the conditions under which Kafka produced these unsettling pieces.

A set of fragments,stories and sketchy ideas,which were all unpublished in Kafka's lifetime. You may have seen some before, but not in this translation.This new translation by Michael Hofmann is,a poet's translation: taut, spare and powerful, this is beautiful. Worth buying for the translation alone .The book is a curates egg: fascinating, irritating, gnomic and pointless in turn. Even some of the ridiculously short fragments, some only a couple of paragraphs long, retain the power to disturb, confuse and provoke thought.However, even.the longer pieces ,like the title story which.is 36 pages long, feel incomplete and unfonished, like works in.progress.Still,there's no one like Kafka. And if you love Kafka, this is a must buy. You will feel familiar ideas of alienation,powerlessness, surrealism and the bureaucratic world oozing from every line. Fragmentary, incomplete, yet,still somehow essential.

Coming back to Kafka after many years I find the claustrophobia of his writing surprisingly hard going. This is not a case of Kafka being less relevant to our contemporary world but perhaps, painfully, more apposite. Take the title story - The Burrow - a tale told by an unspecified burrowing mammal, obsessed with security and tasks he knows are ultimately meaningless, this is Kafka's paranoia at its most intense. Is a strong and characteristic piece of literature? Undoubtedly. Is it enjoyable to read? I leave that for you to decide.The other major story in this collection is 'The Investigations of a Dog' - like 'The Burrow' available in other collections, but perhaps not as well translated as here. The other pieces range from fragments that might just be a page torn out of the writer's notebook to short character studies. Most of these are really only of relevance to the Kafka enthusiast rather than the general reader.As others have suggested, if you want an introduction to Kafka, probably 'Metamorphosis' is the best place to start. If you want more, here it is in all its paranoid darkness.

The title here is perhaps a little misleading, as almost all of Kafka's work was unpublished upon his death, and the two major stories here 'The Burrow' and 'Investigations of A Dog' appear in almost every compilation of his work.After he graduated, Kafka purposely took any undemanding clerking job, enabling him to write in the evenings: The vast majority of this work was burned whilst he was still alive, with only a few short stories being offered for publication on the insistence of the friends in his writer's group. After he died, he left what was left of his work to his friend Max Brod, under the instruction that these too were to be burned, but Brod published them.Kafka then, was writing only for himself, a lifelong exercise in trying to exorcise inner demons, but anyone who is in the market for this particular book knows that already, so there's in point me going on at length about his work. Apart from the aforesaid two widely available stories, these are all little scraps of uncompleted ideas, gestations that seemed to have been rescued from the wastepaper basket rather than finished works.If you want to read Kafka, 'Metamorphosis And Other Stories' is a good place to start, not something like this. If your a completist, it's a nicely presented and translated text. It'll be mainly of interest to scholars, though.

These stories are in the public domain so I compared a couple of free translations with those in this book to see if there's a marked difference. There isn't much in it but this translation removes any quaintness that might be a distraction and pulls 42 half-cocked tales together in one attractive paperback. If you're a Kafka fan this book is probably worth a look. It's essentially a collection of abandoned and unfinished stories that need a sensitive pair of eyes prepared to place them in context and appreciate them for what they are. If you're a layperson, like me, it has little merit but the conisseur will find diamonds in the rough.