Meditation

Franz Kafka

The Complete Works of Franz Kafka 10 巻 · Continental Press

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Franz Kafka's "Meditation" (Betrachtung), a collection of 18 short pieces, serves as an evocative gateway into the psychological and metaphysical realms that would later dominate his more famous works. Each vignette captures a moment of introspection or an ambiguous encounter with the world, creating a mosaic of existential inquiry. These stories, ranging from "Children on the Country Road" to "The Trees," grapple with human estrangement and the fluidity of perception, reflecting Kafka's unique ability to render the mundane as uncanny. This edition contains the following stories: The Alley Window The Misfortune of the Bachelor The Excursion into the Mountains The Sudden Walk Exposure of a Swindler Decisions Children on the Country Road Unhappiness Desire to Become an Indian In "Children on the Country Road," the narrator observes fleeting scenes of life outside a garden, painting a poignant image of childhood's transitory joys and fears. The fragmented narrative reveals not only external events but the narrator's shifting inner world, a hallmark of Kafka's style. These depictions offer a subtle commentary on memory's selective nature, where ordinary episodes attain mythical proportions over time. "Looking Out Distractedly" captures the paradox of urban life, where individuals remain profoundly isolated despite their proximity. The piece's fragmented structure mirrors the protagonist's mental state, as their gaze moves from distant city lights to the immediacy of their thoughts. This juxtaposition emphasizes Kafka's engagement with themes of alienation and the fragmentation of modern identity. As in Nietzsches assertion that man is a rope, tied between beast and overman, Kafkas tales in "Meditation" reveal this tethering, exposing a precarious existence teetering between raw human vulnerability and the search for meaning. These eighteen short pieces lay the groundwork for Kafka's later masterworks, introducing themes of bureaucratic absurdity, failed communication, and the individual's struggle against systematic alienation. Yet they maintain a unique atmospheric quality - less overtly nightmarish than The Trial or The Metamorphosis, they capture the uncanny sensation of reality becoming subtly wrong, like a familiar room viewed from an impossible angle. The collection remembers what most adults forget: that the ordinary world is strange enough to induce vertigo if you look at it directly. In this way, Meditation doesn't just describe alienation - it reproduces it in the reader through its destabilizing effects on perception and meaning. This modern translation from the original German is a fresh, accessible and beautifully rendered text that brings to life Kafka's great literary work. This edition contains extra amplifying material including an illuminating afterword, a timeline of Kafka's life and works alongside of the historical events which shaped his art, and a short biography, to place this work in its socio-historical context.

著者について

A Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, Kafka's work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. His writings, such as "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial," explore themes of alienation, existential anxiety, and guilt, and are influential in modernist literature.