Book Review – A Hunger Artist – Franz Kafka

I have read this short story at least four times. Understandably, it’s very readable. The unease I felt while reading this book is something I cannot describe fully. But I will try. In this short little story, we follow an artist whose art is starving. People of all ages gather to see his sickly thin and bony body. And that’s the entertainment. It is a morbid art and surprisingly the artist was free to choose this or so it seems in the end. But soon in the story his art is discarded for better, more entertaining things like the animals in zoo.

It explores poverty, the ridiculousness of human desires and how pathetic humans are. I loved it.