I am, regrettably, a Kafka fan. I know what this says about me, but I can’t help it. I am a particular fan of his extremely slight, barely there at all stories, which function as oddly-shaped parables. One of these is Eleven Sons, which Kafka wrote as a means of expressing frustration with a pile of unfinished stories. The ‘sons’ are the pieces of writing he is grappling with, and the form of the story follows a description of each in turn. There is a freshness to this format, in lots of ways it’s deeply antithetical to what is apparently necessary for narrative prose fiction: the story has no plot, no setting, it relies entirely on the narrator’s reporting of these characters, who are not even really characters at all, but metaphors. The boldness of Kafka’s minimalism here is addictive; I wanted to see how far I could push the envelope in the same direction.
Written between 1914 and 1917. In 1919, it appeared in Ein Landarzt: Kleine Erzählungen (A Country Doctor)
A Personal Anthology 