Collected Stories Read Online Free PDF

apes … insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me.’ And yet, ‘everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike’.
    He has transformed himself, he explains, because he hadno option. Not in order to find freedom, that is too large a word, associated perhaps with his early life in the forests of Africa, but simply in order to find a way out of his horrible predicament. It is solely for that reason that he has learned to imitate the ways of men – smoking, spitting, drinking, talking. As a result of this single-minded effort he is now able to command the best hotel suites and address such august assemblies as this. And ‘[w]hen I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do’. And yet, ‘[b]y day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it’.
    So, like Bucephalus, he has managed to accommodate to new conditions without nostalgia and without recrimination. It is a decent enough life, even, perhaps, in the eyes of some (the animal in the zoo, the soldier at the front) an enviable one, but it entails a hardening of oneself, a willed denial of the breeze licking about one’s heels, of the look in the eyes of the half-broken animal.
    Nevertheless, this new-found balance testified to a second great creative period in Kafka’s life. This is the period of the parables, the aphorisms, the re-telling of the myths of Poseidon and Prometheus, the meditations on Ulysses and the sirens and on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and of the innumerable perfect, tiny, yet ultimately mysterious stories that are as much a part of Kafka’s legacy as the terrible stories of 1912–14. This is the period of the great flowering of his gift for impersonation, and no writer has ever managed to empathize with such a diversity not just of living creatures but even of bridges, and balls in wooden games. (‘If the ball was unemployed, it spent most of the time strolling to and fro, its hands clasped behind its back, on the plateau, avoiding the paths … It had a rather straddling gait and maintained that it was not made for those narrow paths.’)
    No story of those years shows more clearly how far Kafka has travelled from his earlier concerns and practices than the one called ‘The Cares of a Family Man’. It tells of Odradek,not exactly an object and not quite a creature, with a name which is not precisely Slav and not exactly German:
    At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.
    It is not that Odradek once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only ‘a broken-down remnant’; it has always been like that and though ‘the whole thing looks senseless enough’, it is, in its own way, ‘perfectly finished’. In any case close scrutiny is impossible, for Odradek will never let himself be caught. He lurks in stairs and garrets and disappears for months on end, but always returns to ‘our house’. When you ask him his name he squeaks ‘Odradek’, and when you ask where he lives he squeaks ‘no fixed abode’ and laughs – ‘but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.’
    Not surprisingly he gets on the