The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (edition 1996)

Just got the Barnes & Noble 2003 edition for my daughter.Wonder why I cannot add that edition to my shelves as well. Annoying.




Ok well apart from Metamorphosis (which is brilliant), I'm not that impressed. Several of the stories are basically just a paragraph or two...mere observations...well done, but ho hum. The Stoker was interesting and leaves you hanging wanting more. I actually really preferred reading the Introduction by Michael Hofmann who translated this edition. ( )

Reading Kafka in Prague: that was luxurious.
Metamorphosis is not about change, it is about the human beings' selfishness, it is about close people who are supposed to love us, disposing of oneself when one is not useful anymore. No matter what problems you have, life goes on around you, you are left behind, and sooner or later, you have to face your destiny, which is to die alone.
In the other stories, there is always a common theme: oppressiveness and critical metaphors about life and love. And an impossibility to make things better; all the characters are introduced as mere spectators who witness the inevitable development of their lives, they all are people who will live as slaves because of their imperfections and they won't never reach fulfilment; frustration and despair their only companions.
Kafka had a great mind, his storytelling is unbinding and claustrophobic but, as it happened to me while reading Woolf not long ago, you can not stop reading, he involves you in his dark net, leading you to to an impossible happy ending. Anxiety and admiration is what I felt while reading his works. Beware of that. ( )

This was my favorite book I read for my World Lit II class. Gregor Samsa and the story his abrupt change stirred me in ways I wasn't expecting. At the end of the semester, my professor asked the class to write a short essay about whatever piece we liked best. This is the work I chose, and I ended up writing the most personal essay I've ever handed in on a college level. I'm not going to share that here on the big bad internet, but I just want to say that this little story had a huge impact on me. I'm now a Kafka fan for life.

I didn't really like the translation, it makes it a bit hard to read at times. The sentences are all put together in long paragraphs which makes it boring and confusing. ( )

There's something remarkable about holding the entire output that an author published during his lifetime in one normal length book. Of course much of Franz Kafka's reputation rests on the three novels that were published after his death and against his explicit instructions.

There's also something depressing about this particular volume, and I'm not talking about the stories, many of which are really quite comic. What is depressing is that the stories are arranged chronologically and for the most part they keep getting better and better. Until Kafka's relatively short life ended.

Particularly striking is The Stoker, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, some of the stories in the collection A Country Doctor, and then the stories in the collection A Hunger Artist, particularly the title story, First Sorrow, and Josefine, the Singer, or The Mouse People. Other than Metamorphosis they were all new to me and the precise attention to odd details that have an internal logic but do not correspond to any world we actually know, the strange predicaments of the characters, the precise psychological characterization of alternative viewpoints, all added up to something that really is quite amazing. ( )