Bewilderingly blunt and terrifying. Sizzling in frustration.

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	• Metamorphosis and Other Stories: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Franz Kafka Penguin Classics, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The nightmare of life

Kafka knew so well how to make us feel trapped, estranged and lonely like the characters in his stories. He struggled with anxiety and feelings of inferiority in his own life, and his writing expresses the passive realization that life is a dark and confusing nightmare where we in no way are masters of our destinies. This volume contains five stories, of which the Metamorphosis is the longest and by far the most elaborate and substantial work. A young travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning and realizes that he has been transformed into a giant bug. Having been the provider for his elderly parents and his adolescent sister, he is now forced to crawl around in his room all day, hiding his hideous self from the sister who brings him food, unable to communicate and barred from the world outside. It is a story about being dehumanized and alienated, of being useless and unwanted, of becoming a burden to oneself as well as to others. Kafka is such a phenomenal writer that the mere absurdity of the plot is completely overshadowed by the vivid and somehow realistic descriptions of the emotional and behavioral responses of Gregor and his family to the unreal situation. It is as if Kafka is telling us that this circumstance is no more strange or hopeless than the predicaments faced by the average family. Among the other stories, I found the short "Report to an Academy" particularly compelling. It is the report of a captured ape who has renounced its apehood and become like a human to avoid confinement in the zoo. The ape chose to become a human not because he admired humans in any way, but because it was the only way to escape an unbearable situation. In other words, it is a story about assimilation and accomodation, about the necessity to abandon all individual traits and pre-dispositions to fit in and assure respectability, in short, selling out. Assimilation was of course the order of the day in the late Habsburg Empire, but it may be Kafka's individuality as much as his minority identity which shines through in this short masterpiece. Although not all the stories are of the same quality and contain the same universal insight, the Metamorphosis alone is worth five stars and a strong recommendation.

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Powerfully Disturbing

Don't be fooled by the scant 80 pages in this book...it is a powerful collection of stories. Metamorphosis is truly an amazing short story, about the priority shift of a man who has found himself stuck in the body of a bug. Like most of his other pieces, Kafka deals primarily with the mind, using the despairing feelings of his characters to reach the reader. The other stories, "In the Penal Colony," "A Country Doctor" and others, are equally powerful and equally disturbing, and I recommend this book to anyone interested in reading contemporary classics.

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Bewilderingly blunt and terrifying. Sizzling in frustration.

Kafka presents to the reader a shockingly horrific account of a man, subservient to his aging parents' financial needs, awakening one morning to find himself a bug. Readers are awestruck by his response to this, as Gregor's immediate thoughts shift to fear of missing the train and the "five or six years of debts" he must pay to his employer on behalf of his parents. Struggling with such "arbitrary confusion", Gregor's journey through several months of living with his disastrous calamity is horrific to his audience in it's disgusting truth in the thrill of the routine and thus we see that this metamorphosis is really strictly a physical one, as Gregor has always been an "insect" and object of income to the household. Splendidly executed, Kafka provokes otherwise dormant sentiments of passiveness and futility in his reader and ultimately elicits bewildering feelings of helplessly gradual servility and suppression in one's environment.

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mano kazkoks tas rewiuew yra spie tya ir ta

pavasaris saikle kasi kais kar kaspas laukas pieva kelias upe silo juosta melyna ir pavasarioba;ltas izas us geismu

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5

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