The Metamorphosis and Other Stories in On Paths Unknown

Jan 25, 2014 Rand rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sir-real-is-um, say-tire, shorts, translation, metamorphoses, kafkaesque

An excellent translation fit for the general reader and scholar alike.

Like many, I cut my mandibles on the Corngold translation.

Bernofsky's version is more poetic and hews closer to Samsa's exoskeleton. (This may be the first translation to not interpret the word Ungeziefer as vermin.)

This one is worth picking up for David Cronenberg's musings on mortality and monstrosity. The only real complaint to be made regarding his introductory essay is its brevity.

R. Crumb's version is more fun. But, t ...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Poet Gentleness rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, books-that-make-u-think, read-in-london

This review is for The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor, prepared for the course called 'Fiction of Relationship', for Brow University:
It's a pity, I have to say at first, that I was limited to 500 words. I added a few words for this review, for the sake of making it better.
It contains spoilers.
Let's face it:

The Metamorphosis:
Gregor Samsa wakes one morning and is a bug. This is the first line of the book. I'm not spoiling it.
However, we will understand that Gregor has been being a bug for a lo ...more

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Jun 20, 2014 David rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: short-stories, czechia

One fine morning, on a day in December, Gregor Samsa awoke to find that he had been transformed into an immense Ungeziefer. It was not until after a long discourse on the nature of his immense Ungeziefer-ness, and a long discussion with a Russian emigre novelist it was determined that the etymology of his entomological classification was "merely a big beetle." Having thus been classified, he returned to his quotidian worries of his job and family. He was late for work, which of course was a mino One fine morning, on a day in December, Gregor Samsa awoke to find that he had been transformed into an immense Ungeziefer. It was not until after a long discourse on the nature of his immense Ungeziefer-ness, and a long discussion with a Russian emigre novelist it was determined that the etymology of his entomological classification was "merely a big beetle." Having thus been classified, he returned to his quotidian worries of his job and family. He was late for work, which of course was a minor complications in comparison to his newly coleopteric sense of self. What was Gregor to do? Six legs and a crustaceous carapace do not a fine uniform for a travelling salesman make! He could hardly bear with the sartorial complications of his situation, but again, there were further frustrations! To imagine the burdens upon burdens of waking up to find yourself transformed as such! For this fine morning, it really was too much. What would his father think?

Mr. Samsa awoke on the same fine morning, and thought to himself what a disgustingly queer man his son had grown up to be. Little did he know how much queerer he was now! His son's failure to attach himself to a beautiful young lady, or more so to find success in business and provide the daily bread for his family, greatly disturbed Mr. Samsa. "What the hell kind of son have I raised?" he thought to himself, before masturbating to a silk-stocking ad in his wife's department store catalog. He got up and dressed himself, and hoping to find his wife and daughter in the swing of breakfast preparation, went into the kitchen with a vigor. His wife and daughter seemed to be in a state of hysteria. "Women and their fragile constitutions" he thought to himself. "Always in some state of hysteria or else bleeding from their cunts" he said. "And not even a real son to compensate! Only a ninny and failure of a boy, if he even is that" - it must be confessed that Mr. Samsa's relationship with his son was in a constant state of distress. His son did not match his rarefied ideas of manhood - he had still not realized how right he was! His son, this fine morning, didn't even, in point of fact, meet his basic ideals of humanhood! He crumpled up his semen-ladden advertisement page, before the pearly product of his morning ran from the slippery rotogravure legs of the nameless stocking model. He thought to himself that his wife was denying him sex because he was a poor provider. "Damn her!" he thought to himself, as he tossed away his daily dispensation. "And what about my daughter? Whenever will Grete marry, and get the hell out of my house!? Too many useless mouths to feed! No good fruit has been borne from our copulating anyhow!"

Grete Samsa did not have any thoughts that morning, because she is a young girl. Because of her ephebic girlness, she was, however, overwrought with sentimental and undefinable "feelings" and "emotions" which were: disgust at the enormous bug found in her brother's room, lust for the strappingly strong but facially disfigured milkman, girlish admiration for her father which was wrought with Oedipal sourness and complication for her feeble girl brain, blind adoration for her mother for no other reason than her being another woman and therefore something worthy of imitation and compassion, and general nervousness pursuant to her female constitution. She washed some dishes and cried while she swept the kitchen floor. She almost finished her breakfast but then, even in her abnormally thin frame, felt that an extra bite of her stale flavorless toast might produce an ounce of fat and therefore make her an even less promising candidate for marriage, which, as a young lady, was her only real concern or occupation. She wondered what her mother thought of her, whether she thought her pretty, or useful, or whether her mother regretted begetting such an unhandsome and useless girl-child into the world. She cried.

Mrs. Samsa was fed up. Her husband a hateful bigot and misogynist, not to mention a sexmaniac. He daughter a frail and febrile young idiot, always crying and sweeping like a dolt. And now her son! A goddamn beetle! What the hell would she do with a beetle for a son? God, had her womb failed her. While her disgusting family was distracted by the immense Ungeziefer-ness of Gregor, she slipped away into the cold morning air. She took a deep breath and pulled her threadbare shawl tighter around her shoulders, and gave a huff of visible freedom in the cold air. Walking away, passing under her abandoned window, she heard a crash, and stepping quickly out of the way, she saw her son, fallen and smashed on the sidewalk, like Icarus. "Complete idiot" she thought to herself, "my son, born this fine, fucking morning with a set of beetley-wings to get up and fly away with, and the complete idiot fails even to open them up when he jumps from the fifth story! Botches the whole damn getaway. A real idiot. Real idiots, the whole lot of them!" She continued walking, and as her steps trailed away from that place in the cold and stuff mud of that morning, the traces of somewhat wrinkly smile began to crack onto her not-yet-old face. She was still a bit beautiful, she thought to herself, and she wasn't yet old. She was getting away from that disastrous family, that besmirching episode on her life. Those two children which she could not find the motherly tenderness to love for their disgusting faults and transformations, and her husband who she thought had nothing but semen and stale beer coursing through his veins. "To hell with them all!" she said in a loud whisper as she turned the corner. Later that day, meeting a girlfriend in a coffee shop, two towns away (she was a fast walker, but quickly tired), she retold the story of her morning, and her friend offered to pay the bill for the woman's black coffee. "The whole thing, you know, so strange. I'd even go ahead and call it Kafkaesque, it was so damned odd. Y'know?" Her friend looked her straight in the eye, with a look that turned imperceptibly from compassion to disdain, from the warmth of friendship to the coldness of a critic, "Really, "Kafkaesque"? Why's that? Was it needlessly bureaucratic? Was it hopelessly complex? Really, Gitta, you know that damned expression is overused by idiots!" And she got up and left.

Fin. ...more

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Jul 04, 2013 Poet Gentleness rated it it was amazing

Gregor is a bug because he’s abused, so transforms into his real form. He’s the perfect employee but does so to provide for his lazy family and sister’s dream. He doesn’t have time for love, only work.
His family’s relationship is all a fiction that shatters as he metamorphoses.
The bug isn’t behaving as human anymore. He needs rotten food and crawling, however his human spirit craves contact, hope, love.
The infirm begs to die because he’s a fine wound. For the doctor, he’s healthy because he hasn Gregor is a bug because he’s abused, so transforms into his real form. He’s the perfect employee but does so to provide for his lazy family and sister’s dream. He doesn’t have time for love, only work.
His family’s relationship is all a fiction that shatters as he metamorphoses.
The bug isn’t behaving as human anymore. He needs rotten food and crawling, however his human spirit craves contact, hope, love.
The infirm begs to die because he’s a fine wound. For the doctor, he’s healthy because he hasn’t been examined throughly. The doctor is thinking of Rosa, his work and how much attending the boy is costing him, in a dysfunctional doctorish behavior.
Families and doctor metamorphose, their reactions changing drastically. They hide and become repulsed by their son bug; supervise and don’t examine their libidinous wounded infirm. They lose agency and ability to relate.
Samsas’ grow. Gregor is needed no more.
The infirm’s family is shamed and threatens the doctor to save the dehumanized patient.
“Writing prescriptions is easy, but communicating with folk otherwise is hard”, thinks the doctor.
That’s the point!
The lack of communication, the fiction of relationship. Kafka’s shameful life, poignant contextualized in his letter to his father, in his diaries, is overtly exposed in his texts. His own inferiority and further infirmity, tuberculosis, is the bug, the wound.
Gregor’s and the boy’s families are equals, beyond affinity. That’s never had a why! Because it’s already established the gap between matter and spirit, predestinated:
Gregor is a bug and must go;
The boy’s a wound that has to die;
They’re the bizarre. So why bother asking? Ignorance is preferred. It’s the alienation of giving oneself to the different Other.
Gregor rationalized to be bug and behave in his lair.
The infirm wanted to be left alone and die.
Gregor covered himself from his mother’s eyes because he’s a monster. The boy doesn’t show his wound because it’s shameful. Nonetheless, they’re rejected, sick, no longer humans.
The lack of relationship’s pressure grows and explodes into death. With Freudian symbolisms, an apple kills Gregor, as his mother, almost naked, hugs and begs his father no to kill her son-bug, although she couldn’t bear Gregor’s sight. As the doctor lying naked by his patient couldn’t feel his patient’s pain because there’s no rapport between him and the infirm wound’s weirdness. The so-called humans don’t produce their possible agency.
Mother and doctor try to act as saviors, as they should from the beginning. As modern god/goddess? Although, all are humiliated by their acts, failure.
Kafka’s art, symbolical language, seems nightmarish nonetheless is a parable to lack of understanding real bizarreness in life. It speaks empirically of physical, psychological disabilities, how we should deal with them. Not avoiding agency but trying to be helpful. ...more

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Aug 10, 2012 Xandra rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: thriller-mystery-crime-horror, 1900-1949, philosophy, z-m, european, surreal-fantasy-magic, czech

This guy wakes up and, surprise!, he's a giant bug which is quite inconvenient because he really wants to go to work, but his father is having none of that and shoos him back into his room. Then it gets sad. Ah, humans!
...more

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