This book must be judged in two ways: how good are Kafka's stories? And how good is Hofmann's translation?

I have no idea what it's like in the rest of the world, but we Anglophones think of Kafka as the author of three, well, two novels, and a story about a man turning into a bug. The latter hints at weirdness, while the novels are stories of people trying to do something and it not happening. That's interesting enough, but really, it's not where the action is. Kafka's best writing, I would argue, is in his stories, and this book makes that pretty obvious. The pieces are presented in chronological order, and it's pretty fair to say they get better over time. The early work, up to the 'Hunger Gracchus' fragments, is mildly interesting, but we really get going with 'Building the Great Wall of China', which is dated, here at least, to March, 1917. That's followed by a bunch of fascinating fragments and micro-fictions--consider 'New Lamps' as a distillation of the novels in two glorious pages. Then 1920-1924 gives us some of the best fiction of the century, provided you prefer your fiction to be intellectually appealing, ironic, amusing, and suddenly crushing. Which I assume you do. The high-points of this collection are 'Investigations of a Dog' and 'The Burrow,' both of which are essentially thought experiments. Kafka has, by this point, solve the problem of how fiction can develop without being tied to plot (he doesn't seem to have been much good at plot): here is an idea. What other ideas does it spark? How can we interpret the original idea? What is that original idea like?

As for Hofmann's translations, they are far superior to the earlier translations, but this volume is much shorter than the recent (also very good) 'Konundrum', translated by Peter Wortsman.

Don't come to this book expecting (only) tales of bureaucratic horror. Kafka is far more interesting and entertaining than that. ( )