The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections
- Aug 22, 2017
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 7
★★★☆☆
I don’t recall how I found Kafka in college, but once I did I was hooked. I devoured all the writings he’d published during his lifetime, along with two of the three novels that did not, The Trial and The Castle. I read and reread him as if unable to quench my thirst, and then suddenly I stopped. I haven’t read him since.
Now, I didn’t begin the year with the goal of finally getting to those long-lingering literary works and ticking them off the list, but that’s eventually what I began to do. After books by Orwell, Steinbeck, Kawabata, Faulkner, Roth, and Palahniuk (one of these is not like the others), The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections (a book on my shelf for nearly 20 years) was practically left standing alone, flashing in garish neon and throbbing like a thumb just hit by a hammer.
With apprehension I relented, and for days since finishing it I’ve been somewhat rudderless, my Kafka compass no longer dutifully pointing to true north. I stalled on this review with the hope that some of my certainty would return, that my whole Kafka world hadn’t been irreparably shattered in light of this latest read. A little time for reflection, along with an auspiciously-timed conversation with a friend and fellow Kafkaphile, has begun to right the ship, and I no longer feel like Dorothy discovering that the Wizard is just an old guy behind a curtain with a microphone and booming speaker.
Kafka never intended for the stories, fables, and aphorisms that appear here to be published. In fact, he explicitly instructed his friend, Max Brod, to burn everything, whether finished or in rough draft. Max dutifully ignored the order, and, in addition to this book, thus preserved his three novels, copious letters, and other biographical material. So we’ve got a collection of works the author never intended to have published (though, naturally, there is some debate about whether Kafka really wanted his extant manuscripts destroyed), and a reader worried he may no longer carry the pedestaled love he once did. What could go wrong?
The Great Wall of China opens with four longer stories, and the first of these, “Investigations of a Dog,” seems like a story that would have hooked me in my college days, but now I found it tedious and boring. “The Burrow” followed, building perfectly, little by little, and, though incomplete, restored my hopes greatly, as it had the perfect mix of paranoia, anxiety, overly-abundant attention to detail, and, most importantly, wry humor that are, for me, the hallmarks of great Kafka. The eponymous “Great Wall” came next and suffered from a lack of focus as if it had been written stream-of-consciousnessly, switching gears midway with the original story line exhausting itself and a new one, that also went nowhere, taking its place. Finally, “The Giant Mole” was a frustrating mix of the first two stories, and was an appropriately unsatisfying end to the first section of the collection. More than a dozen shorter stories and fables followed, though only “My Neighbor,” “The Bridge,” the oddly-titled “A Sport,” and “The City Coat of Arms” made much of an impression.
The book concludes with two sets of aphorisms, “He” and “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way,” the latter of which having since been republished in a slightly modified form as The Zürau Aphorisms. I’m not much of an aphorist, and while the format in general is designed to give the pithy (and ideally universal) observations more weight than they often deserve, many here seemed highly personal, and most did nothing for me. The final aphorism, and the final words of this collection, did, however: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” Those five sentences may have been worth the price of admission, and also served to put my mind at rest: though these Kafka works largely failed for me, they did nothing to change my feelings for the writer or his stories and novels that have lingered so strongly within me all these years.
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