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Kafka, Franz.
Metamorphosis.
(Audiobook, Unabridged).
Hong Kong: Naxos Audiobooks, [1915] 2003.
ISBN 978-962-634-286-2.
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If you're haunted by that recurring nightmare about waking up
as a giant insect, this is not the book to read. Me, I
have
other
dreams (although, more recently, mostly about loading out from trade shows
and Hackers' conferences that never end—where could those
have come from?), so I decided to plunge right into this story. It's
really a novella, not a novel—about a hundred pages in a mass-market
paperback print edition, but one you won't soon forget. The genius
of
Kafka
is his ability to relate extraordinary events in the most
prosaic, deadpan terms. He's not just an omniscient narrator; he is
an utterly dispassionate recorder of events, treating banal,
bizarre, and impassioned scenes like a camcorder—just what
happened. Perhaps Kafka's day job, filling out industrial accident
reports for an insurance company, helped to instill the “view
from above” so characteristic of his work.
This works extraordinarily well for this dark, dark story. I guess
it's safe to say that the genre of people waking up as giant insects
and the consequences of that happening was both created and mined out
by Kafka in this tale. There are many lessons one can draw from the
events described here, some of which do not reflect well upon our
species, and others which show that sometimes, even in happy families,
what appears to be the most disastrous adversity may actually, even in
the face of tragedy, be ultimately liberating. I could write four or
five prickly paragraphs about the lessons here for
self-reliance, but that's not why you come here. Read the story and
draw your own conclusions. I'm amazed that younger sister
Grete never agonised over whether she'd inherited the same gene as
Gregor. Wouldn't you? And when she stretches her young body in the
last line, don't you wonder?
Kafka is notoriously difficult to translate. He uses the structure of
the German language to assemble long sentences with a startling
surprise in the last few words when you encounter the verb. This is
difficult to render into English and other languages which use a
subject-verb-object construction in most sentences. Kafka also exploits
ambiguities in German which are not translatable to other languages.
My German is not (remotely) adequate to read, no less appreciate, Kafka
in the original, so translation will have to do for me. Still, even without
the nuances in the original, this is a compelling narrative. The story
is read by British actor
Martin Jarvis,
who adopts an ironic tone which is perfect for Kafka's
understated prose. Musical transitions separate the chapters.
The audible.com
audiobook edition is sold as a single
download of 2 hours and 11 minutes,
31 megabytes at MP3 quality.
An Audio CD edition is
available. A variety of
print editions are available, as
well as this free
online
edition, which seems to be closer than the original German
than that used in this audiobook although, perhaps inevitably,
more clumsy in English.
September 2008