Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Short Stories

Franz Kafka was German writer born in Prague in the early 1880's. After writing countless of short stories and becoming famous for those like Metmorphosis, In Penal Colony and The Trial, he was considered by many brilliant writers to be one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century.

I have been waiting for this chance awhile, and finally I was presented with the opportunity to get a taste of his works when I found this book in my friend's house.

Actually, I really enjoyed this book. For one, I had not expected Franz Kafka to be what he was; I didn't expect that style of writing of his, I didn't expect the things he wrote about, so simplistic and yet so deeply human and emotional.

I must say that my most favorite bit about his short stories was his writing style. I loved the way all his stories are really short – some of them not even a page long. They’re not even so much stories, as these scattered bits of text filled with so many events and descriptions. He liked to describe the littlest, usually most unnoticeable bits and pieces, and he would repeat and rearrange separate words and phrases in one sentence or paragraph, which makes reading his texts almost a sort of a game. Entertaining and informative.

The Airplanes at Brescia and the Meditation collection of short stories really felt like a warm-up to me. I wasn't completely baffled by them, but they showed to me a different Kafka from who I had expected to find in the stories - a real man living a real life, describing real evens and human feelings. The first chapter of The Stoker unfortunately didn't make much of an effect on me, and sadly enough, although it seems he is famous particularly for this story, neither did Metamorphosis. I had heard the name too many times and expected a story filled with surreality and mysticism, and it was nothing of that sort, although it was incredibly strange. I hated the calm tempo of the story despite the upsetting turns of events in it.

Out of the collection A Country Doctor (the actual short story, "A Country Doctor", I admit I did not understand. It confused me greatly), I most enjoyed the judgement of the father describing his "Eleven Sons", one by one, talking about the soul of each, the pluses and minuses of each one in his opinion. On one side it seemed disgraceful for the man to be judging his sons in that way, for he would find somethind unsuitable in each one, and yet, with the story being from the man's point of view, you began to get sucked into his role as father of those sons, and you began to think like him - a man in a huge family like this, all alone, with no one to connect with but his own imperfect replicas.