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Kafka knew so well how to make us feel trapped, estranged and lonely like the characters in his stories. He struggled with anxiety and feelings of inferiority in his own life, and his writing expresses the passive realization that life is a dark and confusing nightmare where we in no way are masters of our destinies. This volume contains five stories, of which the Metamorphosis is the longest and by far the most elaborate and substantial work. A young travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning and realizes that he has been transformed into a giant bug. Having been the provider for his elderly parents and his adolescent sister, he is now forced to crawl around in his room all day, hiding his hideous self from the sister who brings him food, unable to communicate and barred from the world outside. It is a story about being dehumanized and alienated, of being useless and unwanted, of becoming a burden to oneself as well as to others. Kafka is such a phenomenal writer that the mere absurdity of the plot is completely overshadowed by the vivid and somehow realistic descriptions of the emotional and behavioral responses of Gregor and his family to the unreal situation. It is as if Kafka is telling us that this circumstance is no more strange or hopeless than the predicaments faced by the average family. Among the other stories, I found the short "Report to an Academy" particularly compelling. It is the report of a captured ape who has renounced its apehood and become like a human to avoid confinement in the zoo. The ape chose to become a human not because he admired humans in any way, but because it was the only way to escape an unbearable situation. In other words, it is a story about assimilation and accomodation, about the necessity to abandon all individual traits and pre-dispositions to fit in and assure respectability, in short, selling out. Assimilation was of course the order of the day in the late Habsburg Empire, but it may be Kafka's individuality as much as his minority identity which shines through in this short masterpiece. Although not all the stories are of the same quality and contain the same universal insight, the Metamorphosis alone is worth five stars and a strong recommendation.

I finished this book a few days ago and it has taken me several days to understand the Kafka stories well enough to be able to write this review. This isn't due to me being "un-educated". I'm educated and I like to think of myself as being intelligent. But these stories really threw me for days and I had to end up researching the stories online to ultimately find my answers.

This is because although this is definately classic literature at its best, the stories are hard to read. More to the point, they are hard to UNDERSTAND. Each story doesn't have a climax to it. It just stops suddenly and you are left by Kafka to draw your own analysis, conclusions and interpretations. So you have a story where two people are talking and suddenly one of them jumps in a river and kills themself. Story over. Why did that person suddenly choose to end their life? That's up to you to decide. Everyone will interpret the stories in their own way.

There lies the beauty of Kafka. Give his stories to 100 different people and you will end up with 100 different interpretations of what each story means. Some will see a social commentary in a story, others will see a psycho-analytical side to it, and so on. Others won't be able to understand a single word.

So this is not light reading by any means. Be prepared to read pages over and over again to understand them and be prepared to spend days turning each story over in your mind until you finally understand what you read.

Kafka presents to the reader a shockingly horrific account of a man, subservient to his aging parents' financial needs, awakening one morning to find himself a bug. Readers are awestruck by his response to this, as Gregor's immediate thoughts shift to fear of missing the train and the "five or six years of debts" he must pay to his employer on behalf of his parents. Struggling with such "arbitrary confusion", Gregor's journey through several months of living with his disastrous calamity is horrific to his audience in it's disgusting truth in the thrill of the routine and thus we see that this metamorphosis is really strictly a physical one, as Gregor has always been an "insect" and object of income to the household. Splendidly executed, Kafka provokes otherwise dormant sentiments of passiveness and futility in his reader and ultimately elicits bewildering feelings of helplessly gradual servility and suppression in one's environment.

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