A question of responsibility (The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka)

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Product:	The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Date:	28/08/00 (272 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: This book will make you THINK

Disadvantages: People will think you're a pretentious g*t if you tell them you're reading Kafka.

Gregor. Beloved son in a family of four. Selflessly hard-working. Reliable. Trustworthy. Eager to please.

On the day the story begins, he wakes up as a BEETLE.

But this is no sci-fi story or cheap horror tale. Instead, Kafka, in his inimitable style, blends fantasy and reality in carefully-measured quantities. The result is a sobering view of the uglier side of human nature, a perspective drawn directly from Kafka's own life experiences.

Kafka came from a family which expected a lot of its elder son. Once an adult, he was to take on his father's carefully-built business, provide for his parents, maintain his standing amongst abler - and more enthusiastic - relatives. Or so it was planned...

Gregor's shockingly absurd metamorphosis renders all such traditional hopes invalid. As a detached narrator,Kafka, with ruthless logic, works out the shifts in family dynamics which occur as a result of their son's new and fundamentally disturbing physical form. Just as Gregor has undergone a radical change, so now his family slowly adjusts to the new situation - this metamorphosis is for everyone. How will they cope now that the principal breadwinner is incapacitated? Who will pay for his sister's musical education? Will Gregor's father at last have to find himself a job?

The central and most chilling question, however, is how does the family repay its debt of care to Gregor, now that he is effectively an invalid, a guilty secret, an aberration?

Kafka's most famous short story is funny, human, touching and tragic. Yet its form can be seen to work with the rigid, mechanical motion of a mathematical equation. His opening scenario, with Gregor as the mainstay of the family, is altered at one devastating stroke. The rest of the tale consists of working towards the new - and coldly inevitable - conclusion.

As always with Kafka, this is not a book to be read for belly-laughs.
His humour (and there is lots of it in the most unexpected places) remains characteristically dry. Wearing a wry expression, he will take you from the bright hallways of this world into a dank basement room and show you things about human nature which most people would much rather ignore. What do you expect from a guy who wrote that "a good book should work like a hammer ... to break the frozen sea in us" ?

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