Where to start with Kafka
The Metamorphosis starts with an impossible fact and follows the family's practical response; the horror lives in their habits.
You use ‘Kafkaesque’ for bureaucracy but have not yet met the clerk who wrote with such cold comic precision.
Reading Kafka as merely surreal-comic, taking Gregor Samsa's beetle as the joke, and missing that the real subject is the family's accounting and the firm's sick-leave policy. Or, the other failure: reading him as merely paranoid, and missing that he was a working insurance lawyer writing with bureaucratic exactness about what bureaucracies do to the people inside them.
Books in order
- The Metamorphosis — Read it in one sitting. Watch how little of the page is given to Gregor's body and how much is given to the household accounts, the lodger, the apple, and the sister's career. The horror is procedural, not visual.
- The Trial — The same method scaled to a whole legal system. K. is told he is on trial and is never told why, and the novel's job is to make you feel how reasonable everyone in the courtroom seems and how unreasonable that reasonableness is. Read the cathedral chapter slowly, twice.
- Letter to His Father — Kafka's hundred-page letter to his father, never delivered. Read it after the fiction; it is the autobiographical key to the whole project — the bureaucratic exactness, the procedural horror, the calm inability to be heard — laid bare in the original family setting where Kafka first learned the form.
Further reading
- In the Penal Colony — A short story from Kafka's middle period — an officer demonstrating an execution machine to a visiting traveller, with patient, clerical exactness about every part of the apparatus. Read it after The Trial; it is the most distilled single statement of the Kafka method on a procedure that should be unbearable and is instead politely explained.
- A Hunger Artist — The late story collection. Read the title story after the novels; it is Kafka's most concentrated short piece on the artist as a kind of professional refuser — and on what happens when the refusal stops being noticed by anyone at all.
- The Diaries of Franz Kafka — The diaries from 1910 to 1923. Read them after the fiction and the letter; they are a working writer's notebooks — fragments, complaints, beginnings of stories — and they are useful for hearing Kafka think before the published prose has organised itself.
- The Castle — Save The Castle for after The Trial. It is the unfinished, more diffuse cousin, and its rewards depend on a reader who already trusts that Kafka's flatness is a method and not a failure of energy.