Short Story Review Franz Kafka Blumfeld an Elderley Bachelor
A man finds two strange balls following him round the house but traps them and goes to workk as if nothing strange was taking place.
SHORT STORY REVIEW FRANZ KAFKA BLUMFELD AN ELDERLEY BACHELOR 1915
One of Kafka’s most frustrating and inconclusive tales generally regarded as incomplete.
Blumfeld is a cantankerous, fuzzy, obsessively tidy man, who lives alone and frequently criticizes his housekeeper for leaving some clutter or other untidy. He dreams of having a pet dog, but he knows that a dog would require attention and add to the mess in his house, and be alone whenever he went to work, so he goes without.
Arriving home one night, he sees to mysterious small balls hovering in the air in his room, with no apparent means of support or power supply.
The balls prove elusive, moving behind him when he turns round, and pummelling the underside of his bed when he tries to sleep. He can check their progress with bedroom rugs, which slow them down but do not stop them moving around freely. They are however compelled to follow him.
After a short time, he traps them in a large wardrobe, locking them in. He then tries to get a local boy-child to go to his room with the key to find the balls and take them as a present for himself. The boy is frightened by the insistent offer and seems to suspect Blumfeld is trying to seduce him. Two young girls however, seem happy to go and get the balls. Blumfeld leaves them the keys to his room and wardrobe and goes to work.
At this point, Kafka irritates the reader by focusing exclusively on Blumfeld as an employer / employee. The balls are simply not mentioned again, so we don’t know if the girls found the balls, rendered them harmless if they escaped to continue haunting Blumfeld. Instead we see a hard worker, obsessed with efficiency, critical of the laziness and lack of punctuality of colleagues, and obliged to take on assistants who he fears will take over his un-appreciated job as he gets dismissed. This is all well and good, but rather ordinary for Kafka – what I really wanted was more on the balls, but there is nothing more there to be said. What there is proves to quite entertaining, but Kafka did not stay with the project.
Arthur Chappell
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