Note: Pictured above is not the edition I read. I have a random little mass market paperback I got at a library sale many years ago, so this is not a review of a particular translation or introduction or anything, just the work itself.
From unsettling dreams…
I don’t know if any other book has so immediately had such a strong and strange impact on me. The book is divided into three chapters and after reading just the first, it really felt like this book had metamorphosed something in my brain, like some kind of shift in my framework of viewing the world. I still struggle to put my finger on it.
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is a fairly infamous work. The majority of people will know it as the story where the guy turns into a roach without knowing anything more about it beyond that. And I was the same before I finally picked it up! (After a copy of it had been sitting on my shelf for… almost ten years.) So here’s a better idea of what it’s about, without spoilers:
What it’s about
One day, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself turned into a bug. The story begins there and we follow poor Gregor through the consequences of having turned into a bug, trying to hide this from his family, worrying about losing his job, figuring out how to live in this strange new body. Ultimately, it’s a story about alienation and isolation that continues to feel gut-wrenching and poignant in our modern day while also carrying a dark comedy throughout. Originally published in 1915 in three parts.
Some thoughts
Being a novella, it is nicely compacted and does not overstay its welcome. As a matter completely of personal taste, I tend to prefer longer novels, but The Metamorphosis is certainly exactly as long as it should be and I really enjoyed it for what it is.
Without going into specifics, I found the very ending less than satisfying (which Kafka apparently agreed with, the edition I have included an excerpt from a journal in which he wrote that the ending was “unreadable.” I can’t say I feel that harshly about it, but I do think something else could have been done with it).
To conclude…
Overall, I’d highly recommend this work, widely considered one of the most important pieces of literature of the 20th century. I think living in Gregor’s experience throughout The Metamorphosis is so effective at providing a different way of looking at so many things in the world which we take for granted and seeing them in a new, critical light, and more folks should experience that instead of only knowing ‘haha cockroach man.’
I’ve never really written a book review before, so this may be a bit rough. I will endeavor to get better at it over time. ‘Review’ might not even be quite the right word for what I want to be putting down here, but I’m not sure what else I’d call it and folks are generally quite familiar with the idea of a book review so it’s safe in that regard if nothing else.
Get it for yourself:
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