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The most boring story ever. A guy wakes up, notices he is a beetle for whatever reason, and is afraid his family might notice. That's it. Why anyone would waste paper on printing this shit is incomprehendable.
The guy who's partly responsible for feeding his family can't do that very thing anymore and notices that he basically lost all value to them (they start treating him like shit until he dies). If you want you can say its a book about failing to fulfill gender expectations and about why a patriarchy also is bad for men. About people loving him for what he's doing, not for who he is, and that love eroding as soon as he can't do that anymore.
Of course you can hallucinate about everything into that story, but that still does not change the fact that it is boring like hell.
Is it just meowmorphosis but with a cockroach?
I saw a really neat video a while ago that talked about this book, and he interpreted the story to be about disability. You go from being the breadwinner supporting your entire family to suddenly you can't work nor enjoy your hobbies, people don't want to look at you and you feel yourself to be a burden upon everyone. Your loved ones take care of you through a sense of guilt and because to not would be neglectful but the level of care might never actually be as much as it should be. The author of the video (I wish I could remember the name of the channel because he had a wonderful voice, writing style and art style) also proceeded to point out that everyone will either die young or themselves experience disability, so it's also a story about what you will become some day. One day you too will turn into a beatle, struggling to get out of bed, unable to work and relying on others to cook and clean and care for you
Edit: aha I found it! Metamorphosis: The Horror of Disability by Tale Foundry (they're also on Nebula if you subscribe)
It always amazes me how much people hallucinate into a bland and witless story like that.
And it amazes me how utterly unwilling to think some people seem to be.
If there was anything to think in his unhinged writings. Sorry that this guy was a nutcase, but it shows in the stories he wrote, and they were simply not worth the time I had to waste on them.
Classical Literature tends to be about interpretation more than anything. If you read classical literature and don't try to interpret the message it's trying to tell, you're going to feel that way
I don't agree here. Classical literature is often less refined as current literature, simply because there is progress over the centuries. And because classical literature is "classical" and therefor important, many people who consider themselves knowledgeable read things into those texts that were never there to make them sound more relevant. Which is fundamentally wrong.
In the end, one has to accept that humanity progresses, and that things from a hundred years ago really are more primitive than things today. A hundred years ago, people did calculations on a slide rule, now they have computers. And while a slide rule was technically top of the pops back then, nobody would call them bleeding edge today. In a similar way, one has to accept that a story that old simply is a story that old, and simply does not appease the modern mind, because it lacks the technique and finesses that has been developed in storytelling over the last hundred years.
Yes, there have been authors that have been far ahead their peers, like Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German. But they are old literature now, and one still has to read them with the correct timeframe and matching expectations in mind to value their genius. Kafka, on the other hand, never was anything special, at least in none of the works I was forced to read, even if generousely put in the time matching frame and a ton of benefit of doubt. I simply don't understand why anyone puts this nutcase on a pedestal.
It reads way better in German, and by that I mean that the boringness of it feels more like a bleak anti-joke observational humour comedy bit.
I've read it in German, and it was that bad.
Because some people can feel the guy who got turned into a Beetle. And it's sufficiently sad and disorienting to be interesting to read.
You just don't seem to ever feel Gregor.
To me Goethe is far less interesting, even with Dürrenmatt I question if he might be more boring.
I'm not sure I can say what the difference is between people that like and dislike Kafka, but I have a friend who also thinks Kafka to be boring and another who like me quite likes Kafka, when compared to other classics, and in some ways that are hard to pin down we just seem to think differently. So much so that the guy who doesn't care for Kafka at times seems like a bumbling fool and at others like a sage of wisdom, he definitely isn't either of those outright, but our knowledge, our neural pathways might just be different in such a way that even though we are friends and close in age, social and economic strata(and so on), we percive and think fundamentally different.
Why should anyone feel with this Gregor? It is just a story, and a horribly bad one to boot. In a story that is good, capturing the mind, etc, I can easily see to feel with the characters, but this story does simply not warrant wasting any more thoughts.