I Read Stories: The Great Wall of China

The actual Great Wall.

The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka

This short story reads like Kafka riffing off some ideas of what the Great Wall could be or might be, and what China isn’t but is known to be – enormous, bureaucratic, centralised but also shattered, slow and inefficient, yet with a reason behind it. It will not tell you anything true about China or the Great Wall. It might give you something to think about.

Read This: For a minor bit of Kafka musing on incompleteness and delay.
Don’t Read This: For any information about actual China.
Available Online: In translation at this link.