The Metamorphosis

This is a reread for me, though my first reading was over forty years ago. It still had the same impact though: powerful...sad...tragic...strange...isolated....A man wakes up and finds he has changed into a dung beetle. His family, his employer, the servants—-all find the man repulsive. It's never clear what has happened, and it's never clear what is going on, and it's never clear how everything is resolved. A very strange story.

I'm no literary scholar, but I still want to document my thoughts.

A weird story, but so effective. For the longest time, I kept getting from this story themes of mental illness and how othering that experience can feel and how it changes how people see you. Well, the consensus doesn't seem to be that those were the themes being explored, but I did want to mention it.A part of the story that had me quite shocked was how much emphasis Gregor put onto his work and going back to work, even in the face of such a shocking transformation. Work was giving him a sense of purpose, direction, and worth (for self-worth and worth in the eyes of his family).My takeaway is that the more isolated he became and the less like a human his family treated him, the further away his humanity felt. I also enjoyed how his death also allowed for a metamorphosis in its own right to occur to the family and its members.

This edition in particular has a wonderful introduction (although slightly spoilery!), a timeline of his life, some background information, and multiple critical essays about Kafka as an author and The Metamorphosis in itself.

Overall, it was a good time. It's short, but I loved reading it slowly, with pen and tabs in hand.

Or how a selfish and horrible family kills their son. Or how a spineless cockroach doesn't even master the will to get out of his room to save his life. A story that doesn't go anywhere, literally, and whose message is muddled if it is even there. Existential in the worst possible meaning of the term, although technically well written. It's a pity, because it starts with wit and irony, but it soon devolves into boring nothingness.

I know exactly how Grete feels. I have a bug for a brother, too. =_=

Writers from Prague tend to leave indelible impressions on my mind. I'll admit it, I have a pro-Prague bias, I love all things European with the intimacy only a foreigner can achieve. Kafka and Kundera, they are inevitably infused with some of the magic of Prague. Their works are steeped in nuance, they play with overtones and instil their words with ambiguity. All stories are so inherently beautiful in their own right, the act of writing reviews often consist of little more than the cherry-picking of a few choice adjectives, and private, fragmentary reflections on the impotency of words that stubbornly refuse to convey to others the very emotions they provoke in us. The job of the modern writer, then, is to capture that elusive, transient feeling with their words, to bottle it and sell it. Kafka sells despair, but a subtle form of hopelessness that uses the theme of alienation from the rest of the world to express itself. Leaves you just as, if not more, utterly devastated by the end.

The Metamorphosis I think it is a good book to read in one sitting because it is very thin book about 100 pages (depends on publication). This book is almost his biography, his relation with his father, his family and his job. I read this book in the perspective of how Kafka feels what he's gone through, I already read about him before reading this book and really helps in reading the book.You will compare some instances from this book to his real life. But put this all aside, it is decent book to read not extraordinary that some people call (everyone have their own opinion). There is not much you can get from his book and in end you fell depressed and sad also. I'll not talk more because of spoilers, but this book is for those who want to read a short book.

This is one of those classic pieces of literature that has been dissected, discussed, and reviewed, almost since time immemorial, so I can't really add anything of substance to it. I'll just put down my quick thoughts.

This is my favorite book of Kafka's, and I really like Kafka. One of my favorite things to read and explore in a book is the intersection of the absurd and completely mundane, two conflicting aspects of reality, and seeing how people try to wrangle with them existing in the same spot.

You woke up as a giant insect one day? Yeah, well, people still gotta work and pay their rent. You're just going to have to chill under the couch and eat rotten vegetables while your family tries to wonder how they're going to feed themselves without your paycheck. Even as a giant insect, you're still trying to get out the door and tell your boss you can't make it into work.

It speaks to some kind of existential aspect to all of us that I love exploring. Because...it is kind of absurd, isn't it? The fact that even through the most surreal nightmare, we still have the compulsion to continue the daily grind. I've absolutely had nightmares that were crazy and bizarre, like finding out I had no mouth or my arms had been replaced with knives, but I was still trying to wake my mom up and so she can drive me to school. Isn't that so uniquely absurd in how human it is? Humans might be the only creature that will wake up as a giant bug and have their main priority be, “I still have to catch the train to go to work.”

Maybe it's because I'm a disgruntled millennial that this work kind of speaks to me; the sheer incredulous nature of it all, of knowing that just because you woke up as a giant insect one day, it doesn't mean your crushing obligations of daily life magically go away. To me, that's where the fascination and beauty(?) of Kafka's writing comes into play: The intersection of nightmarish surrealism with nightmarish mundane life, two different kinds of horror.

I'd be really interested to see how different generations react to this story. I'd be especially interested to see who sympathizes more with the family versus who sympathizes more with Gregor? While I sympathized with both parties, I definitely found myself feeling almost heartbroken for Gregor in the story.

So, if you're a nerd for classic literature like me, you'll probably like this book.

I usually don't read classics so it feels weird to be rating this.
I enjoyed this. 

Especially now that I sit and think about how the story runs so much deeper. The more that i think about it the more I feel with Gregor Samsa's feeling of loneliness, hatred, self loathing, and how tired he is with his life of constant hard work. A life where his entire self worth is tied to how productive he is. Even to this day it's definitely open to interpretation, and remains relevant in my opinion.
So beautifully well done, subtle, but puts the point across.