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The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Franz Kafka

Start date: May 20, 2022

Discussion: LET'S KEEP IT SHORT

Why we're reading this: It's short Kafka, doh.…more
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What Members Thought

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

18 likes · Like · see review

Feb 06, 2014 Philippe Malzieu rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A démoniac nightmare. The style is cold, clinical without any empathy. All was known as, all interpretations are possible. There is no only one truth. What is mine?. I think that poses the problem of the family relations. There is the metaphor of the badly loved son. We can all imagine on him (maladie ugliness homosexuality...). The intention is to separate of him. There is a great relief when he dies.
One can see the premises of the schoah there

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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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Apr 14, 2015 Addicted to Books rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: own-kindle

Review coming up

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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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Jul 21, 2013 J.M. Hushour rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Poor Kafka hasn't weathered well the century since he first wrote this pivotal work, but it's not his fault. "The Met" is a fine little story, with absolutely nothing to take issue with. It is brief, concise, and unambiguous, especially if you know anything about his life. Its real worth lies in the break it made psychologically with the previous few periods of literature. Much like Beethoven had done with music a century prior, and the way Strindberg and Dostoevsky and other guys like that had ...more

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Jan 09, 2014 Viji (Bookish endeavors) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: close-to-heart, philosophical-fiction, classics, franz-kafka

Hollow deep inside.. That's what I feel after reading this book.. The loneliness and pain was too much to bear. I felt suffocated at each stage when Gregor had to recede towards some dark corner. How dignified he had been at the beginning of the story,being the sole-earner for his family. And how pathetic his situation becomes in the end. I felt contempt against the family when they decided to sack the servant just because she had expressed their own feelings loudly. The story shows the metamorp ...more

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