A Country Doctor

By Franz Kafka

"A Country Doctor" (German: "Ein Landarzt") is a short story written in 1919 by Franz Kafka. It was first published in the collection of short stories of the same title.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BoD E-Short
• Release date: Mar 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9783734730436

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born to Jewish parents in Bohemia in 1883. Kafka’s father was a luxury goods retailer who worked long hours and as a result never became close with his son. Kafka’s relationship with his father greatly influenced his later writing and directly informed his Brief an den Vater (Letter to His Father). Kafka had a thorough education and was fluent in both German and Czech. As a young man, he was hired to work at an insurance company where he was quickly promoted despite his desire to devote his time to writing rather than insurance. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote a great number of stories, letters, and essays, but burned the majority of his work before his death and requested that his friend Max Brod burn the rest. Brod, however, did not fulfill this request and published many of the works in the years following Kafka’s death of tuberculosis in 1924. Thus, most of Kafka’s works were published posthumously, and he did not live to see them recognized as some of the most important examples of literature of the twentieth century. Kafka’s works are considered among the most significant pieces of existentialist writing, and he is remembered for his poignant depictions of internal conflicts with alienation and oppression. Some of Kafka’s most famous works include The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle.

Reviews for A Country Doctor

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The early Kafka represented in this work is only a pale foreshadowing of the mind that would produce The Trial, The Castle, and Metamorphosis. Many of these stories are simply jotted down thoughts that are only partially developed.

[krizia_lazaro_3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book was really short and really uninteresting. Nothing much can be said about it.

[aoibhealfae · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Another Kafka story which equally baffled me and even more sinister if you found that Noh-influenced Japanese short anime film. Its a story about a doctor and the snow stormy night when he was called out to meet a patient but weird things started happening to him which is hard to explain what happened exactly.

Personally this is more in line towards the Absurdist element than Melville's Bartleby does since this novel is like a ride with Fringe's Dr Walter Bishop on LSD. Unfortunately this story seemed to revolve around the idea of rape too. In fact, when the doctor's horse died from the chill, a man gave him horses for his trip and seemingly went after the maid while the doctor speed to his patient house. Then later the patient's family undress him and push him inside the bed naked and everything seemed to went against all sense of reasoning and so we're left in a paranoid loop by the author and his character and neither of us could even make sense of anything.

Honestly, if there are more clarity in this story, I would have been impressed by it. There are moment when I got suck into the story like Edgar Allan Poe's Tell-tale Heart and Raven, but then Kafka just pull out every strand of conscience and reality and jumble it all out and throw it out of the window.

There's also a recurrent element of self-deprecating and suicide which was again the focus from the style and it wouldn't be as menacing had it be more subtle. Kafka was an interesting character with a really dark passenger inside him. But it became obvious that while most touted him as a great influence in "existentialism", all I see was a man grasping at his sanity and becoming aware of the futility of his reality which was suffocating him.

[ymusmani0 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Loved: Before the Law, Kafka couldn't have presented our law in a better analogy! Th brilliance of it all left me breathless and sad because there was sooooo much truth in his words!Hated: Jackals and Arabs, that was just one mean story! Why point out a certain nation? If he wanted to write this he could have used the Martians for all anyone cared! But just using a race shows that here Kafka's main aim was not presenting a story or even good story telling technique but to present his mere hatred for a nation...