Franz Kafka On Books That Gut Us
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us - but what does that really mean. Kafka explains in a letter to a friend.
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us” —Franz Kafka
In January 1904, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his childhood friend, the art historian Oskar Pollak. Kafka had just finished reading the diaries of German poet Christian Friedrich Hebbel. It was an 1800 page tome and it gutted him.
He wrote to Pollack that he’d only read snippets before. So he sat and read it cover to cover. The book hit him so hard he couldn’t even write while he was reading it.
The letter is reproduced in Franz Kafka; Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors.
He says…
…it's good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive to every twinge. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write?
Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to.But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Basically, he’s saying what literary people have said for all of time.
Books shape us.
I remember reading Anne of Green Gables as a kid, stunned that her stepfather was a feminist. That was a big concept when it was written at the turn of the century.
Ham On Rye was one of the first books that hit me in the gut with how raw and real the writing was. Flowers For Algernon, which I re-read and wrote about recently.
Books like The Glass Castle, The Little Prince, and Our Missing Hearts. So many more I’d like to write about. More books than time to write about them.
I’d love to know what books gutted you or shaped you. Favorites?
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet 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. —Franz Kafka
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Linda
It’s been a long time since a book gutted me. Partly because reading has become hard after surviving a very abusive relationship. Recently, I finally gotten back into books, but it’s been a slow process.
To cope, I discovered storytelling in gaming. My sons bought me a PS5 and several games rated the best at storytelling. That’s how I found The Last of Us. This two-parter’s plot arc is amazing. The ending gutted me, and I just sobbed.
The thing that hit me the hardest was the tension between our perceived right to justice yet we can never fully understand the motives of another. That we are more interconnected than we think. It’s a powerful story. HBO has bought the rights and has aired the first part. It’s good. The game is better.
After high school, I went to college (‘cause that’s what you just did, right?), but it was mostly white noise. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I knew enough to know this wasn’t it. I’d read William Least-Heat Moon’s ‘Blue Highways,’ and had resonated deeply with me. I dropped out (more like faded away), bought a carton of cigarettes and hit the open road. I didn’t know what I was looking for; I figured I’d know it when I saw it. And i spent a lot of time roaming around the forgotten parts of the American west. There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t touch the interstate, and a lot of interesting people doing the best they can.