From the Bookshelf of Should have read classics…

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

Start date: April 1, 2014

Finish date: April 30, 2014

Discussion: Group Book Discussions

Why we're reading this: This is the group read for April. Try to remember the spoiler alerts, if the discussion is in the early s…more
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What Members Thought

Jun 30, 2013 Thomas Acland rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20th-century, classics, short-stories, original-language-german, fantasy, 1910-s, magical-realism

The version of this that I read was actually a copy of Metamorphosis & other stories and as well as the title novella it also contained the following short stories.

i) The Great Wall of China
ii) Investigations of a Dog
iii) The Burrow
iv) In the Penal Settlement
v) The Giant Mole

However as with probably every other person that has read this book I was only really interested in reading the metamorphosis itself. I did try a few of the other short stories but they were nowhere near as interesting The version of this that I read was actually a copy of Metamorphosis & other stories and as well as the title novella it also contained the following short stories.

i) The Great Wall of China
ii) Investigations of a Dog
iii) The Burrow
iv) In the Penal Settlement
v) The Giant Mole

However as with probably every other person that has read this book I was only really interested in reading the metamorphosis itself. I did try a few of the other short stories but they were nowhere near as interesting and completely failed to catch the imagination in the same way as metamorphosis.

My rating for this is therefore based solely on my review of Metamorphosis and does not take into account the fact that I did not enjoy the other stories.

The story of Metamorphosis is under 60 pages long and therefore is amongst the shortest stories I have ever read, however what it lacks in length it makes up for in imagination. The story is wonderfully unique and has one of the most memorable first lines of any book I've read:

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic beetle"

To me this one line was one of the main reasons I picked the book up in the first place, it was one of those lines that instantly drew me in and made me want to know how the story was going to develop from this event. In a way it reminded me of the sort of opening line you would get at school when the teacher gave the task of writing a story from a random opening line.

The rest of the story is brief but excellently thought out, told through the perspective of a man who has become a beetle it is so vastly different to anything else that I have read that I really can't begin to describe it. The writing style really helps as the plot is not fantastic, beyond the opening sentence there are few twists in the plot and it's a fairly simple story, but the writing style is great and at only 60 pages you can't have too much happening.

It's one of those books that everyone probably should read and lots of people will read. It's worth reading once for it's uniqueness and the images in conjures up but won't be one of those books that I'm going to look to re-read.
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