How can you have a reading project and not include Kafka? Although I was 100% positive that I wouldn’t be able to get any Czech specific insight by reading “Metamorphosis”, I wanted to use OBOC to finally force myself to pick up Kafka. He is one of the writers of whom I’ve read a bit more than I’ve read anything by him, and I knew I couldn’t stay like that forever.
So with trepidation I picked up Metamorphosis as I was not sure if I wanted to enter the Kafkaseque world, but here I am completely transformed on reading this novella which I would recommend to anyone who has been postponing reading Kafka.
Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, hardworker, the dutiful son and loving brother, wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a vermin (or a cockroach or an insect, depending on how you want to interpret it). Instead of evoking sympathy from his family, he only evokes horror and disgust except from his loving sister Grete who takes care of him. Relegated to one room, he lives like a prisoner to keep himself away from visitors, eating filth by choice, crawling on his fours and occasionaly looking out of the window. Without his income to provide for them, the rest of the family starts to pick up the slack and they even take on lodgers to make up for the shortfall. Drawn to his sister’s music on the violin, he crawls out of his room causing panic among the lodgers who promptly vacate his house. Pelted with apples by his father, and hated by his own sister for not being sensitive to their feelings, he goes back to his room collapses and eventually dies due to starvation and from the infection from the apple stuck to his back. While Gregor is relieved of his painful existence, the rest of the family are relieved from the burden of having to deal with him. The family quickly moves from this painful state, into a new home, with new hopes for Grete.
This short novella has spawned countless interpretations and inspirations that it is one of the favorite books of anyone who is someone in literature today from Marquez to Rushdie. Personally, I was amazed by how a completely absurd scenario held me in total captivity and I was entwined in the long sentences which are supposed to be signatures of the Kafkan style. Despite the gloom and doom there was an undercurrent of dark humor which heightened the intensity of the story.
“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous insect” – an opening sentence that seems to have transformed students of literature into entomologists. The amount of passionate discussion around the word insect (was it a beetle, a dung beetle, a cockroach, does it have wings, how big was it, was it a vermin) puts E.O.Wilson and his love for ants to shame!
Milan Kundera was going to be my pick for Czech, but I had cheated as I already saw the movie “The unbearable lightness of being”, so I decided to go straight to the master himself and now having undergone the metamorphosis personally, I can’t wait to read more.
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