Mila's logs

I dedicate this post to Franz Kafka, as I have stated before, The Metamorphosis is a written work I truly love. Yet this time, I feel less compelled to speak about the well-known, well-read novel and instead talk about the collection of unfinished works I have in my hand right here.

I picked up this book from my university bookstore because I have this very unsustainable hobby of visiting bookstores and buying books to add to my TBR (to-be-read) list, which if printed out, could be taller than me now.

Unnecessary information aside, Kafka’s works are pleasant to read because of their unmatched negativity. Kafka’s works, especially the unfinished ones, have a flare of the inexplicable nature of despair. What I mean by this is that there are often no answers or solutions to human despair, and the unfinished state itself is a physical representation of that. Personally, I feel that when one is in great sorrow, it is more comforting to be gifted words of the same heartache than that of optimism and happiness.

Many of the fragmente are very short, some of them only 3 lines or so. I would recommend this to anyone who isn’t much of a reader but wants to dabble in Kafka’s works. It seems that other authors such as Kenji Miyazawa have embraced the “completeness of incomplete works,” as he defines it.

Unfortunately, the copy I have here is in Japanese so I’ll instead leave a link to Harvard University Press of Kafka’s more famous unfinished works: Before the Law.