Book Review: Metamorphosis
The events of 2021 have left me run aground in the beach sands of life. The issues are not new or unique. Yet, they are mine.
People around me are touched by a weird hand, and they suddenly turn out to be different people. The very same people, who I thought are close, are morphing for the worse. There is a reason for their attitude and drift. Aloof and away, yet perfectly logical.
So, here I am in August 2021. Will life deal cards that I cannot decipher and play? Will people treat me as ‘Verwandlung’, as Gregor Samsa saw himself transformed one morning? I used to be a sales man too. Even now, I run around to close financial deals.
May be, that is why I got attracted to the book ‘Metamorphosis’, by Franz Kafka. Somewhere, the book also found its reader — me. I could relate myself to Gregor Samsa, the lead character of the novella.
Title and Cover:
Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ is a short novella of about 80 pages, translated in English by David Willie, and published by Finger Print Publishing in India.
The book cover is abstract art, but it clearly shows a human head and limbs, but the abdomen is hazy, and limbs are more than two. The transformation of a human body is the first of two transformations.
The cover looks like a dark fiction cover, and is intriguing. I turned into the pages quickly out of scary revulsion and intrigue.
Between the Covers:
The first and the last lines of the book sum up the metamorphosis. The first line, simple yet setting the stage for the entire novel goes like this. ‘One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed into his bed into a horrible vermin.’
Let us look at the last line. ‘Greta was the first to get up and stretch out her young body.’ The two lines summarize the whole story. A master piece of writing.
The first metamorphosis is Gregor’s body into a vermin, and the second is Greta, his sister’s body into a young and beautiful woman — like a butterfly. Now the story lies in between.
Gregor’s transformation into a human head and an insect’s body has its clear disadvantages. He is locked inside his bedroom by his sister. Her sister is the one who empathizes with him and brings him food. But even she cannot stand his looks. He had to hid beneath the couch or cover himself with a bedsheet. The relationship progressively deteriorates, first led by the financial deficit left by stopping of Gregor’s earnings as a travelling salesman, second by the changing mindset of the family members. The empathy turns into apathy, and apathy finally turns into animosity.
Greta cares little about his food or cleanliness of his room, and eventually moves on to find a job and support her family. The family tries to cope the aftermath of Gregor’s transformation — his father works as a security guard as a bank and his mother sews for almost 12 hours a day. The family grows tired of Gregor’s load on them, forgetting that he had made their lives better by working off the debts that his father owed his boss.
The charwoman who cleans up the room and finally dumbs all material into his room, is fearless in handling him or his looks. Gregor is called ‘a dung beetle’ by her.
The final nail in the Gregor’s coffin, literally, is the act in the living room. Greta’s violin attracts the three unsuspecting tenants, who live in a room rented out to them by the Samsa family, and Gregor as well. Seeing Gregor’s horrible form, the tenants give notice and exit. This event acts as the last straw for Greta, who strongly suggests that ‘this’ is not Gregor, and Gregor would have understood what his family is going through.
Their father, Mr. Samsa, is agnostic, derisive and combative to Gregor’s overall existence and in many instances, assaults him. Greta’s suggestion is seconded by him. Mrs. Samsa, while pitying her son on various occasions, is shocked by his form, and eventually she agrees to the plan of getting rid of Gregor, the vermin.
Shocked at her sister’s travesty, Gregor enters his room and starves himself to death. The charwoman discovers and disposes his dried and thinned vermin body. The family moves on, and the parents note that Greta is now a fully grown young woman and is ready for a suitor.
An Epiphany:
As I explore nihilism, led by a Persian-German-American-Indian trail for my upcoming poetry review, and abetted by events in my own life, a revelation that came across — while I wrote the last my short stories ‘The Comrade’ and ‘Left with Crimson’ — a bit of Kafka has seeped into my writing, at least for now.
Kafka brings elements in his own life into the interactions of the main characters — Gregor, Greta and Mr Samsa in particular. Whether it is the travesty of Greta or the highhanded apathy of Mr. Samsa, or Gregor’s own behavior, all have tinges of autobiographical references from Kafka’s life.
Given the crossing of paths of my own keyboard with Kafka’s pen, a revelation of the similarities presents itself, stemming from two aspects. One, the easy crossover and back between fantasy and reality, and second, the autobiographical inferences are relatable to me.
Kafka’s mastery lies in the easy crossovers make the reader lose sense of reality while fantasizing, yet leaving the reader to introspect about the possible deeper layers of the interaction between the family members, especially the brother and the sister.
The ending itself is simple, yet telling — the family sees itself liberated after it bid good riddance to the morphed family member, who they don’t consider anymore — is the ultimate metamorphosis of humans’ characters.
The book means a lot to me, as it appeared in my mailbox at the right time, when so much tumult is happening within, yet representative of my own place and position in the journey as an author.
~Ashok Subramanian
