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A review by liesthemoontells
Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka
1.0
At the start of 2022, I set myself the challenge of reading through the Penguin Modern Classics box set at the rate of one per week, with no skipping or quitting any volume. This book is the reason why I am writing this review in December and not April - it's only 56 pages, but it is such a slog it took me eight months to pick it back up and finish the second half.
There is no doubt that Kafka was one of the great literary minds of the last century. When considering the brilliance of works like Metamorphosis and The Trial, it can be easy to gloss over the ethics of his friend Max Brod's decision to publish all of Kafka's manuscripts after his death, after having been instructed by Kafka to burn them. This book is a case study to why there is a valid ethical concern around publishing work posthumously without the author's consent, even when that author is a genius.
While there may have been some merit to the core idea of imagining the mind of a dog as philosopher, Kafka's tedious and jumbled stream-of-consciousness prose is laborious to the point of becoming meaningless. To me, this reads very clearly as an author's terrible first draft that required several rewrites before being given over to public readership. Why Penguin chose to include this story as their introduction to Kafka in the Penguin Modern collection, forgoing so many of his other compelling and incisive works, is baffling to me.
I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone looking for a short introduction to the work of Kafka start with Metamorphosis instead. If reading this review has made you interested in learning more about the ongoing ethical quandary behind the publication of Kafka's work, I would suggest reading Kafka's Last Trial: The Strange Case of a Literary Legacy by Benjamin Balint (2018).
There is no doubt that Kafka was one of the great literary minds of the last century. When considering the brilliance of works like Metamorphosis and The Trial, it can be easy to gloss over the ethics of his friend Max Brod's decision to publish all of Kafka's manuscripts after his death, after having been instructed by Kafka to burn them. This book is a case study to why there is a valid ethical concern around publishing work posthumously without the author's consent, even when that author is a genius.
While there may have been some merit to the core idea of imagining the mind of a dog as philosopher, Kafka's tedious and jumbled stream-of-consciousness prose is laborious to the point of becoming meaningless. To me, this reads very clearly as an author's terrible first draft that required several rewrites before being given over to public readership. Why Penguin chose to include this story as their introduction to Kafka in the Penguin Modern collection, forgoing so many of his other compelling and incisive works, is baffling to me.
I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone looking for a short introduction to the work of Kafka start with Metamorphosis instead. If reading this review has made you interested in learning more about the ongoing ethical quandary behind the publication of Kafka's work, I would suggest reading Kafka's Last Trial: The Strange Case of a Literary Legacy by Benjamin Balint (2018).