Tag: Franz Kafka

‘A Little Fable’ by Franz Kafka translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir

I first read this story when I was 16, during a period when I was very lost and unhappy in the wake of my father’s death. It was one of the first texts to open up the possibilities of literature for me and it still lifts my spirits. The story is tiny, so short that I can insert the whole thing here:

Alas,’ said the mouse, ‘the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.’ ‘You only need to change your direction,’ said the cat, and ate it up.

First published as ‘Kleine Fabel’ in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1931, and in English in The Great Wall of China, Schocken, 1946

‘Josefine the Singer, or The Mouse People’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann

I first read Kafka as a teenager and fell in love with his ideas. When I read him now it is the language that I love, the way he uses words with such precision. Reading him is like having a world built around you brick by brick (word by word) relentlessly until you are an inhabitant. Strangely, the experience is quite joyous, even when the subject matter is extremely dark and unsettling. It is the joy of being in the company of a completely liberated imagination. I could have chosen almost anything, but have gone for this slightly lesser-known story. Although we are never quite sure if we are reading about mouse-like people, or people-like mice, the story of the hold Josefine has on her downtrodden and fearful people, who otherwise have no understanding or appreciation of music (“when she is gone, music will disappear – perhaps for ever – from our lives”), is entrancing, terrifying, heartbreaking and hilarious all at once. Oh – and it breaks all the rules of short story writing.

First published as ‘Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse’ in Ein Hungerkünstler, Verlag Die Schmiede, 1924. Translation published in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Penguin, 2007

‘Eleven Sons’ by Franz Kafka

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)

‘Neptune’ by Franz Kafka

In this story Kafka imagines the god Poseidon sitting at his desk under the waves and crunching numbers. Kafka presents us with a Poseidon whose job as god of the sea no one truly understands. Because he is so busy in his management position, he never gets to enjoy the sea over which he rules. Poseidon would love to find a new job, but what else is he really qualified to do? Kafka ironically and humorously concludes his story, “He liked to joke that he was waiting for the end of the world, then he’d find a free moment right before the end, after completing his final calculation, to take a quick spin in the sea.” I read this story in a new translation of Kafka’s prose done by Peter Wortsman and published by Archipelago Books. Wortsman has chosen a wonderful selection of shorter writings that showcase the range of the author’s brilliance.

Written in 1920 in German but never published during the author’s lifetime. Translated into English by Peter Wortsman, collected in Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, Archipelago Books, 2016; also by Michael Hofmann in Investigations of a Dog and Other Creatures, New Directions, 2017. Hofmann’s version is available to read online in the Paris Review, here

‘Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor’ by Franz Kafka

You are born in Prague 1883, a Jewish German Bohemian in Austria-Hungary. You are lonely, an isolated man. You become a lawyer and an insurance office worker. You want to write, but work consumes all your time. You work in a textile factory, a small tyrant at work and at home. You become a partner in an asbestos factory, but it too takes up all your time. You want companionship without having to have responsibility or empathy. You develop tuberculosis and are forced to take a pension and spend most of your time in sanatoriums. You are dying, but you have time to write. You get your wish. It is a curse. You are shy, you are hilarious, you are a womaniser, you are tormented by your family. Your life is invaded by two celluloid balls, constantly bouncing, which take over your home. You are incredibly sensitive to noise. The noise of the balls haunts you. You produce a series of idiosyncratic masterpieces, many of them unfinished at your death, including this story. You are haunted by duality: the balls, the Mädchen, the apprentices. You will die a couple of decades into the century which, perhaps more than any other writer, you will capture in its bureaucratic, savage, mechanised horror. You are Blumfeld, an Elderly Batchelor. You are Franz Kafka.

First published by Mercy Sohn, 1936; first published in English in The Partisan Review, translated by Philip Horton, 1938, Vol 6 Nos 1 & 2. Collected in Description of a Struggle, Schocken, 1958, and The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 1983

‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka

I know, I know. I did try and choose a less famous Kafka story. I thought long and hard about including The Giant Mole, with its magnificent first line: “Those, and I am one of them, who find even an ordinary sized mole disgusting, would probably have died of disgust if they had seen the great mole that a few years back was observed in the neighbourhood of one of our villages, which achieved a certain transitory celebrity on account of the incident.” But in the end I realised that a large part of what I loved about the mole was that it reminded me of Gregor Samsa, the giant insect or beetle or cockroach (depending on translation), his legs spinning in his single bed.

First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. Widely translated

‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann

Picking ‘The Metamorphosis’ out of Kafka’s stories feels a bit like saying your favourite Beatles album is The Best of the Beatles, but I chose it because I had a transformational experience on my second reading. I first read it in my teens, when I understood this to be the ne plus ultra of young alienation, and I didn’t like it. The story was too long, the central horror of the transformation felt somehow undetailed, and what seemed to be the most compelling element – Gregor’s transformation – became increasingly sidelined in favour of the family’s troubles, culminating in a final scene, in which Gregor’s sister Grete stands up on a tram, that seemed utterly inconsequential to me. Some years later, I returned to the story and it was a revelation. Some of my most enduring experiences with art have involved a work that I’ve disliked on first impression; the experience of understanding its complexity or tone on a second reading seems to double the pleasure. When reading again, I realised that it was a mistake to assume that Gregor was the centre of the story’s gravity, and that Kafka’s bone-dry humour is easily missed. The final scene – where Gregor’s pupal sacrifice precedes the butterfly-like opening up of Grete – clicked into place, and the beauty and sadness of the story came into focus. And then I read all the Kafka I could find.

First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. Widely translated in English. Hoffman’s translation is from Metamorphosis & Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2015

‘Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann

Readers might get bored three-quarters of the way through The Trial. Readers might not finish The Castle (I hear some of you thinking even Kafka couldn’t). But there’s no excuse not to read ‘Metamorphosis.’ Surely, you’ve read it? Shame on you if you haven’t. Kafka makes Gregor Samsa more human the more Gregor transforms into a bug. The scene of Gregor with an apple lodged in him! If Kafka had an ounce of arrogant motherfucker in him he could have dropped his pen right then and there.
 
A few errant Kafka thoughts. I was with a group of writers talking about ‘Metamorphosis’ and all of them agreed that the ending was a complete mystery. What does Grete stretching at the end mean? they kept asking. I wanted to say that the Samsas looked pretty happy to be rid of Gregor but there was such a passion amongst those writers for understanding Kafka solely as an unknowable puzzle I sadly kept my mouth shut. Later, one of the writers said they had a friend who spent ten years reading only Kafka and that after ten years announced, “The meaning of Kafka is that there is no meaning.” I’ve worried about that writer’s friend far more than is necessary.

First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. Widely translated in English. The translation I read is from Metamorphosis & Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2015

‘A Country Doctor’ by Franz Kafka

By contrast, this is a story I read maybe once a month, because I never know how it’s going to make me feel. It’s more of a full-on anxiety dream than many of Kafka’s, and I’ve already deleted a couple of attempted summaries of what happens, because there’s no point. I can’t get to the bottom of it, probably because there is none. I only started into Kafka about ten years ago, but it’s become a total addiction. I’m not especially interested in the man himself, though that stage of the disorder may well be coming. For now, I just marvel at what he uncovered and left us with, and how much of the writing I love from the hundred years since has its source in his remarkable spirit.

First published in German in the eponymous collection, 1917. Widely translated and collected, including in The Complete Short Stories, Vintage Classics. Available online here, translated by Ian Johnston

‘Vor dem Gesetz’ (Before the Law) by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me was that, at the age of eleven, I had the opportunity to learn German. One of the many ways in which learning a second language changed my life was that it introduced me to short stories, and German ones at that. As any language-learner knows, short stories are perfect classroom fodder: they’re brief enough to be assigned for homework and it’s usually easy enough to find one to suit a particular proficiency level. The stories I struggled through in high school, and later university, were probably the first short stories I ever read with care: Heinrich Böll’s ‘Du fährst zu oft nach Heidelberg’, Ben Witter’s ‘Das nächste Mal andere Blumen’, eventually Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

This six-inch Kafka parable was first published in 1915, and it went on to make a cameo in his novel The Trial. It’s so short that to give a precis would be to retell it. I don’t even have anything particularly insightful to say about it. I’m including it here because, after two decades of thinking about it, I’m still thinking about it.

Collected in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Penguin, 2008, and available widely online in translations of varying quality

‘A Hunger Artist’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

‘A Hunger Artist’ was the only short story that Kafka deemed worthy of preservation, though history proved him wrong. The opening plunges the reader deep into the Kafka’s world: “During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible.” The narrator’s observations are factually true, for public displays of starvation by Giovanni Succi and others were popular sideshows in the 19th Century. One of the great ironists of literature, Kafka turns the caged performer fasting in a freakshow into an artist. The spectators, children among them, initially marvel at his skill, while butchers stand guard to make sure he doesn’t break the rules. However, the public, being fickle, eventually loses interest and the artist joins a traveling circus, where his cage is soon ignored in favor of the animal attractions. The artist nevertheless continues with his craft, breaking all known fasting records while lying in the corner of his cage. He explains, in his defense, that he only fasted because he couldn’t find the food he liked. His corpse is at last discarded and replaced by a well-fed panther which attracts far more attention.
 
This story is a parable of the artist turning his struggle for spiritual sustenance into a spectacle that feeds the public’s savage hunger for entertainment. Even if he is lucky enough to be noticed for a while, the artist will be misunderstood, and in any case, it is only a matter of time. Walking in Kafka’s footsteps in Prague a few years ago, with exhibits of relentless brutality and renewed authoritarianism only a finger-tap away, I found it nevertheless reassuring to imagine him stepping beside me with his long, loping gait, a gentle ascetic racked by prophetic visions. 

First published in 1922. Included in a translation by Willa and Edwin Muir in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, Schocken Books, 1988. Available online here

A Kafka Personal Anthology

Editor’s note: Toby’s 12 stories are gathered as a single entry in the Personal Anthology archive so as not to skew the author statistics. Only German publication details are given. The stories are available in English in many different translations and publications.

I am going to try and write about Kafka subjectively, without making generalizations that aren’t personal. It would be a generalization to say, ‘There have been too many generalizations about Kafka’, so I will just say, ‘I’ve read a lot of generalizations about Kafka.’

It wasn’t until I was twenty, and living in Prague, that I read Kafka. I’d finished a whole English literature degree without doing more than read essays (generalizations) about him. Before Prague, Kafka had been – for me – someone cool people read, i.e., the boy who sat beside me in third form maths, both of us bottom of the class, who had a hardback copy of The Castle. He told me it was ‘very funny’, before putting it away. His father subscribed to The Morning Star and smoked roll-ups. Theirs was the kind of house which had Kafka in it. Our house had Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet.

‘Before the Law’ (First published as ‘Vor dem Gesetz’ in Selbstwehr in 1915. Collected in Ein Landartz, Wolff, 1919)

‘An Imperial Message’ (First published as ‘Eine kaiserliche Botschaft’ in Selbstwehr in 1919. Collected in Ein Landartz.)

I’m going to take these two sort-of stories together. I know they’ve been ripped out of longer pieces, and aren’t necessarily standalone. But I met them as stories. The pale blue Penguin Collected Stories of Franz Kafka was the first edition of him I ever owned. The translations are the early ones, by Willa and Edwin Muir, Tania and James Stern, and Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. I still like these best. Kafka, in German, may be scratchier, or more bureaucratic; these translations seem to me to have a fitting chunkiness. They are immersive, and they ache.

‘Before the Law’ is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read. It does something Kafka often does – distort time. A man arrives at a gate, and waits there, hoping for justice, talking to the gatekeeper. A lifetime passes, or the duration of the universe. The story ends without consolation. “‘No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.’”

To balance this comes ‘An Imperial Message’, which begins in terror and ends in sentiment. ‘Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.’ This is unlike the Kafka I know from elsewhere. He’s almost turned into Wordsworth. There is no certain knowledge, in this dream – I suppose that’s an anxiety. The dream could be merely a dream of consolation, of communication. It is less sure than the fact that the gate in ‘Before the Law’ was made only for the man who never entered it. But, deluded or not, ‘An Imperial Message’ reaches a lyric calm. That’s not a state the remainder of Kafka puts me in. I don’t bite my fingernails, yet reading him makes me feel like gnawing. I constantly feel ‘I don’t get it’ – even whilst I’m aware, particularly with the parables, that they are constructed to be ungettable.

I’m not going to be perverse, so the next two choices are automatic.

‘The Metamorphosis’ (first published as Die Verwandlung, Wolff, 1915)

When I first read ‘The Metamorphosis’, I was concentrating on Gregor. The greatest change was his: man to bug. When I reread it just now, it seemed to be much more about the Samsa family. For a story that is fantasy, it’s notable that – given a bit of historical triangulation (wages, rents) – you could very accurately reconstruct the Samsa’s accounts book. Their descent from the bourgeoisie to the working class takes place in lurches but Kafka itemizes the details of each new, lower level. It is Grete, Gregor’s sister, who is the suffering romantic individual.

‘In the Penal Colony’ (First published as In der Strafkolonie, Wolff, 1919)

This story changes each time I read it. At one point, I thought it was the greatest of the twentieth century – with ‘The Metamorphosis’ at number 2. Now, I find it harder and harder to get through. (And ‘The Metamorphosis’ is back on top.) Kafka’s relation to the reader here seems to be a sadistic. In other stories, he is suffering with us. If there is an unjust divine order, Franz is going to fall victim to it just as inevitably as we are. ‘In the Penal Colony’, with its stylistic assurance, seems to gloat. The prose wears a uniform that, if it isn’t neat any more, was manufactured by a state capable of making neat uniforms. In order to render his similar world bearable, Graham Greene scruffed up the writing in The Power and the Glory. Kafka seems to show himself as up to recording or inventing the unbearable – and that, at least the last time I read it, makes the story seem bizarrely chipper about the general calamity of it all. Kafka is on the side of Yawheh; matey with Him. But I’m getting close to generalizing. And next time I read the story, Kafka will probably seem as abject as Gregor Samsa with the apple in his back.

‘Investigations of a Dog’ (First published as ‘Forschungen eines Hundes’, posthumously, in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1931)

This is the Kafka story I love most. A few years ago, I did a report for Radio 3’s The Verb – hosted by Ian McMillan – on novels and stories with dog-narrators. I knew in advance, before looking into the various dog detective novels, that ‘Investigations of a Dog’ would be the best. The narrator, like most of Kafka’s narrators, is in decline. “Also my researches have fallen into desuetude, I relax, I grow weary, I trot mechanically where once I raced into the question: ‘Whence does the earth procure this food?’” The erasure of humankind from the doggy world is comic and a good lesson in decentring. Deleuze and Guattari’s book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature is brilliant on Kafka’s writing about animals. It’s the kind of angle J.M. Coetzee constantly rips off.

‘Description of a Struggle’ (First published in fragmentary form in Hyperion, 1908 and 1909, and in Betrachtung, Rowohlt Verlag, 1912. Published in full, posthumously, as ‘Beschreibung eines Kampfes’ in the collection of that name, 1936.)

This was one of the last stories by Kafka I read. I think I’d heard someone saying it wasn’t very good. It’s early, and not typical. But here is a paragraph that stunned me: 

It’s the beauty of girls altogether. Often when I see dresses with manifold pleats, frills, and flounces smoothly clinging to beautiful bodies, it occurs to me that they will not remain like this for long, that they will get creases that cannot be ironed out, dust will gather in the trimmings too thick to be removed, and that no one will make herself so miserable and ridiculous as every day to put on the same precious dress in the morning and take it off at night. And yet I see girls who are beautiful enough, displaying all kinds of attractive muscles and little bones and smooth skin and masses of fine hair, and who appear every day in the same natural fancy dress, always laying the same face in the same palm, on returning late from a party, this face stares out at them from the mirror, worn out, swollen, already seen by too many people, hardly worth wearing any more.

The whole story reminds me of the sequence of Amadeus where Mozart’s Don Giovanni is being travestied in the Theater An der Wiesen, and everything is going weirdly wonderful. Entrances are made through the walls and the ceiling.

I also see Kafka through the films of The Quay Brothers – their dusty, magical stop-motion animations. If you haven’t encountered any of them, watch one right now. If the Quays were to adapt anything of Kafka’s, I think this story might be possible; the better known ones might be too image-trampled. I know, from DVD extras videos, that what they obsess over most are Kafka’s letters and diaries.

‘A Hunger Artist’ (first published as ‘Ein Hungerkünstler’ in Die neue Rundschau, 1922. Collected in Ein Hungerkünstler, published posthumously by Verlag Die Schmiede, 1924)

I can imagine this being many people’s favourite Kafka story, particularly writers. I’ve admired it more than I’ve loved it, because I am wary of the delight in suffering it exhibits.

‘A Hunger Artist’ seems to be one of a group of what I’d call riff stories. Not quite what the NME (borrowing from the band Alberto y lost trios Paranoias, who had a hit with a song of this title) used to call ‘Heads Down, No-Nonsense, Mindless Boogie’, but definitely connected – in my mind – to the 4/4 motorik of the band Neu! The story chooses a direction and goes in it; there isn’t a huge amount of dynamics or modulation. Degeneration reaches a kind of steady stage, even though we know degeneration’s what it is. Until the end. Which feels optional. Here, in the Hunger Artist’s words, “I always wanted you to admire my fasting”, I detect a little self-pity. Or an appeal to the reader’s own self-pity. At the very least, it’s not a merciless story, like ‘In the Penal Colony’. And I feel I can come to the end of it – it doesn’t fade out into something ineffably recursive, like a lock groove slowly turning into William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops.

‘The Bucket Rider’ (first published as ‘Der Kübelreiter’ in Prager Presse, 1921. Collected in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer)

This is Kafka at his most folky. He seems to shake hands with Marc Chagall, mid-air. And together they agree that fantastical weightlessness, though surely one of humankind’s commonest desires, is still a weirdness worth enacting. Both do flying in a beautifully matter-of-fact way.

A completely separate thought about Kafka, but one that’s come to obsess me, is also simple: I don’t believe he would have written any of his stories the way he did had he lived in a centrally heated, double-glazed house. His works seem to me those of a man who woke up, most mornings, in a very cold room. To venture out of bed was to be stripped of heat. The world meets man with coldness. But Kafka, I think, appreciated this. In his writings, chill is usually clarity; fug is sordid and obfuscatory. (I think Dickens, who Kafka sometimes felt he was only copying, agreed with this.) Maybe there are exceptions; maybe I’m just wrong. Kafka’s characters seem to come closest to a state of rightness when they are alone beneath icy stars.

‘The Wish to be a Red Indian’ (first published as ‘Wunsch, Indianer zu werden’ in Betrachtung)

I can include this in full, so I will: 

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would already be gone.

Every time, this story does pulls a vanishing act on me; every time, I’m amazed. I re-read the shorter short stories most often: ‘The Truth about Sancho Panza’ and ‘The Silence of the Sirens’. This one, I read almost every time I pick up the book.

In the last novel I published, Patience, the main character – who is called Elliott and who is almost completely paralysed – imagines himself galloping towards the horizon like Kafka’s ‘Red Indian’. I’m pretty sure this story is Elliott’s start point.

‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’ (first published as ‘Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse’ in Ein Hungerkünstler)

Being of that generation, I can’t read the title of this story without thinking of the children’s TV show Bagpuss (1974) and the ‘Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Organ’ that appeared in one episode.

‘Josephine’ is a story that I know I don’t understand, and probably will never understand, but– partly for that reason – it feels as if it still lies ahead of me. There’s something folky about it that a great deal of reading around the subject might clarify. But I can’t understand why, at this point in his life and in the decline of his body, Kafka wanted to write this story. Is it a return to the maternal? Is it about a distorted childhood myth? No idea.

‘The Great Wall of China’ (First published, posthumously, as ‘Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer’ in Der Morgen and collected in the eponymous collection)

In 2003, I went to China, and visited the Great Wall. I was travelling with the British Council. Our guide, and minder, taught us a phrase in Mandarin: “He who has not gone to the Great Wall is not a true man.” In the original, when I pronounced it, it sounded much gruffer than this; a bit like a coughing fit. (Bù dào cháng chéng fēi hǎo hàn.) I was thinking about Kafka all through the time I was there. Rather than read guidebooks about China, in advance of going, I had decided to learn as much of the language as I could, from a Teach Yourself book, and to read Kafka’s Chinese writings. I took a copy of his stories to the Wall, and snatched time to read a few paragraphs in tribute. We were on a guided tour up the most touristy bit of the Wall. But Kafka still seemed as good as any Western guide to China is likely to be. Of course, Kafka never went anywhere near China.

‘The Burrow’ (first published, posthumously, as ‘Der Bau’, in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer)

Of all Kafka’s stories, this is the one that has had the biggest influence on my writing. I re-read it whilst writing Patience. I came up with a whole theory of writing, most of which I’ve forgotten. It was about some stories not narrating experiences but being them. Part of the experience, with ‘The Burrow’, is extreme frustration and claustrophobia. Like Tarkovsky, you wish for some parts of it to be over – enough! This has gone on long enough! Then you break through into a new appreciation of time, and you wish the whole thing could extend to the eternal horizon. Something like that. Something like Patience.

In this way, Kafka’s later writing is zazen – the Soto Zen practice of just sitting. Just sitting with infernal leg pains, sexual fantasies, financial anxieties, imaginary and real enemies chorusing away. Just sitting with the weight of the body. This isn’t positively pleasurable, until just the repeated doing of it becomes so.

Few readers will enjoy ‘The Burrow’ – enjoy enjoy. But I see it as a way forward for literary writing – one that a number of writers have undertaken: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, Claire-Louise Bennett. Not coincidentally, these are all favourite writers of mine.

‘The Burrow’ by Franz Kafka, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

The audacity of writing a story from the point of view of an unidentified rodent struck me as a young reader. The madness of the narrative voice and its utter relatability as it spirals into insanity and paranoia and then blooms with a kind of transcendent joy, seems to me an ideal structure for any piece of art. This story has shaped my understanding of reading and writing and I continue to appreciate it. I read it in Metamorphosis and other stories as a teenager and the volume also included ‘In the Penal Colony’, which I made the mistake of reading before bed. It continues to haunt me. 

First published in German in 1931. Widely available, including in The Complete Short Stories, Vintage 2005. Available online here