The Metamorphosis & Other Stories (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) - Softcover

Tom Griffith John R. Williams Franz Kafka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840226722 ISBN 13: 9781840226720

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 2011

Synopsis

Translated, with an introduction, by John R. Williams

This selection of Kafka’s shorter prose writings includes one of the few works published during his lifetime: the harrowing story of Gregor Samsa’s overnight transformation into a verminous insect, his record of the effect of this sudden metamorphosis on himself and the reaction of his family. It conveys with an unsettling mixture of subjective involvement and objective detachment the complex feelings of guilt, affection, responsibility and self-doubt that characterise Kafka’s perception of intimate emotional relationships – themes that are continued in the quasi-fictional story The Judgement and the quasi-autobiographical Letter to his Father. Issues of guilt, punishment and penance are also treated with startling brutality in the story set in a tropical penal colony that describes in horrific detail a machine designed to inflict an ingenious and barbaric form of execution on victims of a summary and arbitrary justice – a machine, however, that in this instance destroys not its intended victim, but its zealous operator and, simultaneously, itself. Kafka’s enigmatic fables deal, often in dark and quirkily humorous terms, with the insoluble dilemmas of a world in which there appears to be no reassurance, no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.

About this title

Review:

aI think of a Kafka story as a perfect work of literary art, as approachable as it is strange, and as strange as it is approachable.a aMichael Hofmann

About this edition

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1840226722
• ISBN 13: 9781840226720
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 158