* 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."
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.
ReplyDeleteEntirely 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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