* Grab your current book or recent read.
* Share a few "teaser" sentences from somewhere in the book.
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away. You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title and author so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teaser!
I wasn’t planning to re-read Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka when it was selected as the February Classic Group Read, but it fit a 2016 Ultimate Challenge criteria and is short, so I ended up reading it over last weekend. I found it to be as weird and even more depressing than when I first read it back in high school English class.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections.
(Opening paragraph)
ABOUT THE BOOK:
With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis.
It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like 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."
2 comments:
It's been about that long since I've read it. I'm not sure if I should re-read it now. I have enough depressing things in my life without adding to it, though I laughed my way through it the first time.
Entirely up to you whether to reread or not. I wasn't planning on it, but at least it was a fast read and I was done with it in a day.
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