New revised and expanded edition of the 2001 "Agra" edition, which was produced in collaboration with the Laboratory of Designs and Images in Crisis.
From the last writings of Franz Kafka, The Structure condenses essential features of his writing and some of the recurring themes of the Kafkaesque universe: isolation, doubt, loneliness, and above all, constant reflection and self-observation.
The protagonist, as so often in Kafka's short stories, is an animal-artist, which, however, is not precisely defined, leaving the reader to imagine its exact appearance and size. The text consists of a monologue: The reader immerses themselves in the underground structure that the animal has constructed with immense effort and becomes a participant in its pride, but also in its growing anxiety.
The characteristic ambivalence typical of Kafka reaches its peak here. The structure is simultaneously a nest and a prison, salvation and condemnation, a marvelous achievement and a fatal mistake. And its creator, wavering between bliss and panic, becomes increasingly entangled—like the reader—in the labyrinthine passages of its creation.
The text invites us to descend into Kafka's world, a world that, as the animal observes, "is multifaceted and never lacks unpleasant surprises."
We need those books that affect us like a disaster that causes us acute pain, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, as if they left us exposed in the forest, far from all people, like a suicide; a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
—FRANZ KAFKA
