Every Kafka book, if not really badly translated, deserves a 5-star rating. However, the foreword of this book is misleading and insufficient, in fact, any critic on Kafka without detailed analysis on Kafka's family and the society is misleading and insufficient.
Kafka was an over-sensitive humanbeing. He was thin and weak, while his father was big and strong. He worshiped his father. Although he did not want to obey his father (he wanted a career in writing), he was not strong enough to fight him (he finally earned his law degree). He loved his family and sacrificed a lot to his family, but they were common mercenary, heartless people who never understood his pain, which resulted The Judgement (toward his father) and The Metamorphisis (toward his whole family).
Kafka was not a German, nor did Prague ever belong to Germany. It seems that few people are aware that Kafka lived in the breaking and dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, a mess of multi-nationality and multi-language. Hitler or Stalin or foreign politics was not Kafka's concern, and his works bear little evidence upon the struggle between Germans and Jews, the problems came within his own country, which was experiencing the pain of breaking into independent nations and the transition from monarchy to modern capitalism. The government was desperately showing its fading power by turning itself into a killing machine. (In The Trial, Joseph K never knew what he had been charged for, he could not find anybody to assist him, and he was finally secretly executed without a trial). Kafka's job has no important impact on his writing, but it exposed him to enough loneliness and unfortune in the lower society, and corruption in the government, which certainly added no credit to the Empire. Kafka actually saw the government and his father as the same tyrant, without either, Kafka would not be Kafka.
If there is anything Kafkaesque, it is Kafka's way to see the world. Kafka did not imagine anything, he just honestly describe the world in his view. That is why no one can imitate Kafka. Whatever bizzare to us is routine to him. He writes with such calmness that it makes one think: maybe there does exist someone turning into a roach everyday.
Translation is not frictionless, no matter how well done it is. If you really love Kafka, and want a better understanding, start learning German today!
(Unfortunately people cannot revise their reviews after they are posted, please forgive any immature thought).
