The Metamorphosis

Stanley Corngold (Translator)

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

With this  startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The  Metamorphosis. It is the story of a  young man who, transformed overnight into a giant  beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to  his family, an outsider in his own home, a  quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though  absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The  Metamorphosis has taken its place as one  of the most widely read and influential works of  twentieth-century fiction.

As W.H. Auden wrote,  “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”

• ISBN10: 0553213695
• ISBN13: 9780553213690
• Publish Date: 1 February 1972
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc
• Imprint: Bantam Doubleday Dell
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780553213690

Reviews

[clementine]

I'm always wary of reading translations because you either sacrifice accuracy or aesthetic, and so any review I give of the English version I read is going to be tainted by that. Unfortunately, my German is limited to counting and cuss words, so the translation will have to do.

I honestly didn't feel anything about this book until about halfway through. I wasn't enjoying it, and I wasn't hating it. I was just reading it. Then I started to find it a bit tedious. Maybe I just didn't get it. I honestly think I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd read it in school, and I know that NOBODY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD has ever said that, but I liked having smart people explain things to me that I never would have noticed on my own. I still have not honed my literary analysis skill.

I actually did like the ending, which I think makes me more disposed to like it. I thought it was exactly what had to happen, and I liked that it was approached in such a detached, barely emotional way.

I think I still need to develop my sophisticated taste for extended metaphors, because I'm not such a huge fan of books that require analysis just to get anything out of them. I mean, obviously I like intelligent literature, but I just can't enjoy overly academic fiction. I'll just have to accept that I'm uncultured swine at the moment.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

I just finished Franz Kafka’s seminal novella, The Metamorphosis. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the story of Gregor, waking to find himself transformed into an insect; and I was pleasantly surprised. Not only does it go through the struggles of this mysterious change for Gregor, but the intense effect it has on his parents and sister. This is a quick read, a little strange, very dark but thought provoking at the same time. A lot of people get dragged into reading this book for high-school (mainly in America) and as a result may end up hating this book. But there really is a lot of literary merit to this book, and I can see why people are made to study it.