A Hunger Artist & Other Stories; Poems and Songs of Love

The Kafka I adored. The rest was good. This is why I gave it four stars instead of five.

The first thing to know is that it’s a flipside book. On one hand you have “A Hunger Artist and Other Short Stories” by Franz Kafka, and on the other it’s “Poems and Songs of Love” by Georg Mordechai Langer, translated from Hebrew by Elena and Menachem Wolff. I read a digital version, which made me regret the good old paper books, which I could have simply turned in my hands instead of reprogramming the settings my computer screen for the second half.

These two works were put together mostly because of the link between the original writers. Kafka was a friend and a mentor for Langer, although we also learn in Langer’s poetry that he was in love with Kafka. But let’s start with the beginning. There’re pretty strange short stories in this book. Surreal, disturbing, sad… You never really know what’s coming. You don’t really know if things make sense, but it doesn’t matter. You enter in a kind of alternate universe where the writer wants you to think differently, to think his way. At first, it’s baffling (especially “A Country Doctor”, and its dreamlike setting), but soon enough you get used to it and you’re really looking forward to the next story.

Some of them left me thinking (“In Front of the Law”), others left me more indifferent, but I most admit that everyone of them has at least a little something. The style is constantly reinvented so it seemed to me each story could have been written by someone different, but at the same time you can feel that they’re all interconnected. I think that one of my favourites is “An Ancient Manuscript”, which is about the fear of immigrants and difference. I read this side of the book twice, so the second time I could enjoy even more the texts, that I already knew by then.

About “Poems and Songs of Love”, I have to say that I have no idea how faithful to the original the translators have been since I can’t read Hebrew, but the English version by itself is definitely a success. I don’t consider being qualified enough to analyse their meaning, but I think the words are perfectly chosen and the images powerful.

I love Kafka, but I prefer him in his novels. The short stories have the same perplexity and the same sense of paradox that is so profound in his works, but in some cases I felt that the story would not finish. Some were very powerful such as "In front of the law", but others were an argument after the other.

The poems were  great. I can't really say much since I don't know their original language, but I believe the translation was good.

I liked it.  Would recommend to Kafka fans.

Oh my. Kafka was beautiful. absolutely beautiful. I would recommend to ALL Kafka fans alike. Just phenomenal. Thank you for the opportunity.

Sterling work from the publishers in presenting two collections of the master of modernism's short works – the collection he published as ''A Country Doctor'' is the rarer of the two, and perhaps hard to get a grip on with its very short pieces.  Still, while it shows up the limitations to the modern ear of the modernist style – all lengthy, multi-clause sentences and page-long paragraphs – it shows how varied and diverse Kafka's output could be (even if no less than the first four works all mention horses strongly).  ''A Hunger Artist'' as a collection of four works was always going to be a bit more awkward, for the longer works don't always particularly carry their values as easily – twenty pages on a mouse (or not) that sings (or not) aren't the most easy-going.

Attached to these works are poems, more or less long lost and hardly ever (if at all) translated into English, from a man Kafka's letters and diaries mention a few times each, but one who perhaps was secretly in love with him – certainly there's a spread of mentions of secrets, lost loves and more in there alongside the eulogy to Kafka that the translators based their biographical search around.  Some of the verse works, mostly it doesn't, and while it's a detail that's going to rouse some academic thought it won't set the world alight as a published entity.  We should turn to the Kafka for that – if not for the first time, as he was and still is a must-read, canonical entity.  The translations read fine – brighter than I remember a certain married couple's works of old as being.  For the concentration on the shorter pieces, then, this book is unusual, and completely necessary.