April 22, 2025 • 27 mins
Boy are cockroaches gross!
'Metamorphosis & Other Stories' by Franz Kafka is a collection of prose poems, short stories, sketches, allegories, and novelettes. The longest is of Gregor Samsa, the travelling salesman who wakes up in his bed as a cockroach. You'll find others about conflict on a ship, dealing with annoying people on the street, etc. All are told in the surreal style he is known for, along with his dry humour.
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Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:51) Themes/Questions
(00:15:30) Author & Extras
(00:21:49) Summary
(00:24:34) Value 4 Value
(00:26:01) Join Live!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyrin Down (00:00):
Boy, your cockroaches gross.
Welcome,
everyone, to another episode of the mere models book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 04/23/2025.
And as you might surmise, this is the podcast where I lovingly caress cockroaches.
(00:23):
No. No. None of that's going on today. But you will find a cockroach in this book here, Metamorphosis
and Other Stories by Franz Kafka.
So this book was published in 1915.
I have the translated version into English. It was originally published in German,
by Michael Hoffman.
And it's 265
(00:44):
pages in length. No pictures or anything in,
like that in here. There is a fair bit of blank space just because the all the
the titles of some of these things, they they kinda bleed into each other. So you do have a lot of blank space in the book. I'd say it took me about six hours of reading to get through in total.
Now it's a collection of prose, poems, short stories, sketches,
(01:06):
allegories,
novelts,
very short and random things which you'll find within here. I did a little rough count, and I think there's probably about 40 short stories,
with most of them being, like, one to three pages long.
And then a couple four or five, which are closer to like 10 to 40 ish pages.
(01:27):
So there's a lot to go within this book. A couple of the names here are things like The Sudden Walk, The Businessman,
the way home dresses, the trees,
the stoker
and a fratricide, 11 sons, a little woman, etcetera, etcetera.
There's a lot to go on here. The longest that you'll find within is of the titular metamorphosis,
(01:48):
which features
the ever handsome Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes up in his bed as a cockroach. And you wanna say, like, and then hilarity
ensues.
Unfortunately, no. It's rather grim. It's rather surreal. It's rather weird. And that is the style of of mister Franz Kafka. And
I guess there's a, like, a dry humor that you could say within these, but a lot of this stuff is is really, really random. Like, 11 sons, for example, is just a guy listing off his 11 sons and
(02:20):
why he likes or dislikes each each one of them and their personalities.
You've got,
things like, I think it was the way home or, the men running past, which would just be like a guy gets followed on the streets to a party, and then he's, like, trying to get rid of this person. And it's like, oh, this is awkward. Like, how do I get rid of him?
A lot of random stuff within this book. It's very hard
(02:42):
to say
exactly what each is about because it would take too long because they are short stories. You know, my explanation of it would take longer than just reading the story. So let's jump into the main theme for today, and that is the surreal. What the hell is the surreal?
And I guess we're going to really be focusing on
Kafka's style
(03:03):
as the actual theme for today,
because it is very distinct
and you can see it throughout most of these things.
Some of the short stories, which are only a page or two pages long, not really.
But I'm gonna be focusing on the four or five ones of length, which I mentioned. So these are
(03:24):
The Judgment
let me get them in order. The Judgment, a story for f,
which was in 1913.
The Stoker of Fragment, 1913 as well. Metamorphosis,
1913. In The Penal Colony, published in 1919.
And,
there was one other,
A Hunger Artist,
which was published in 1924.
(03:45):
And that one is slightly a little bit different from the others.
And what are these about? Well, okay. The judgment is a man realizes his father is insane. He keeps, you know, this man is talking about this friend that he's had from a long time ago.
And he kind of has this relationship with his father, which he thinks is great.
(04:05):
And then upon talking with his father and about this friend,
his father goes into, like, this insane rambling rant.
And the man, I guess, is kind of questioning, like, oh, wait, is is this all a conspiracy against me? Or is my father insane? Am I insane? That's kind of the the feeling you get. The stoker, which is a young man on a boat traveling from Germany to America,
(04:29):
is
a,
loses his things, goes back into the ship, meets this guy, the stoker, who he kind of
is not enamored by in some sort of way or who he likes
and helps him on his quest for
vengeance
against the, his overseer, who he feels is on treating him harshly and gets into, like, a big mishap, put it, putting himself into other people's situations.
(04:54):
Metamorphosis
I've already talked about,
but we see, Gregor Samsara in this cockroach body,
trying to live in this small apartment as a giant cockroach. And the disgust of the I would say the,
well
intentioned,
the adequate, the
appropriate. That's the word I'm thinking for the appropriate disgust of his own family members at his transformation.
(05:19):
We also have in the penal colony, which is a sadistic officer showing off his torture machine to a traveler
and then a hunger artist, which is a starving performer
who stops himself intentionally. This kind of
feels unappreciated,
from the lay public of his art that he is doing and that people don't understand, like, the greatness that he's doing.
(05:42):
So I guess what
with all of these stories,
what I there's this kind of atmosphere. It's it's menacing. It's foreboding. It's
it's rather strange. And,
I think the reason this gets created is not because of the subversion of the,
of the people in the story. It's like the subversion of our expectations
(06:07):
and watching these people within the story because
they get themselves into very bizarre situations.
And it's almost like it's just from the get go. You start reading the story. You know, I'll I'll read out the
the first sentence of metaphor metamorphosis
because that is kind of a
well, well known,
(06:27):
one. So here we go. When Gregor Samso awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.
Alright. You get right into it with that one. So
I think there's
what we see is that these people are a little bit neurotic. We're typically
receiving the story from the point of view of someone. So it'll be from Greg or Samsa. It'll be from the traveler in the penal colony. It'll be from the point of view of the young man in the stoker,
(06:57):
the other young man in the, in the,
what was it, the judgment.
And
they're they're usually pretty neurotic. They're thinking about things too much. They're, like, overthinking things. Oh, if I do this, what's this other person gonna do? And, you know, that's that's kind of reasonable. If you've experienced any neuroticism in your life, if you've ever experienced social anxiety or wondering, oh, like if I do this or you want to do something, but you're kind of like afraid of talking to the pretty girl or or, you know, it's a group setting and you're like, oh, I don't want to barge in, but, you know, this sort of thing, you'll you'll understand these sorts of feelings.
(07:32):
But what is different is that
when they get themselves into something which you would rightly think is like, am I dreaming right now? This is very not normal. Is this insane? Is this someone pulling a prank on me? Like, what the hell is going on? They don't spend that much time with that. They adapt to a very extreme situation and then just continue on as normal. So Gregor Sampler, for example, the cockroach,
(07:59):
his immediate reactions are like, I'm going to be late for work. Shit.
You know, how can I explain this to my boss? Oh, my family's going to be embarrassed or, you know, I don't want to inconvenience them
by being a giant cockroach
in this room.
And
so it's it's this really weird thing where you go, okay, they're in a very mundane situation
(08:22):
or
they're treating an extreme situation as mundane is probably the better way of saying it,
Even though
life continues as normal for everyone in the book, it's it's kind of
there's many things I can think of this kind of like The X Files, for example.
There was a show in here in Australia called Round the Twist, which is very similar, where it's like these magical things happen, but you're
(08:48):
it's not magical in the sense of wonderment. It's magical in the sense of like
eerie as probably the best way of putting it. So,
you know, they don't find anything wrong with what is happening is is probably the strangest thing
of all when you encounter these stories, which are like,
oh, this is something's a bit wrong here. So that menacing undertone, how does it get created and what makes it surreal?
(09:13):
You know, I think that surreal
portion is if I had to look up the definition, I'm sure it's something like a situation that does seem normal in some sort of respect, but has a very like a twist to it.
And
you see this, you know, there's everyday locations and events, but
the main common theme I really see coming up through all of this is death or some sort of desire for death that kind of gradually creeps in.
(09:41):
And it's not that death is some sort of blissful
end state to be achieved, like a nirvana
or a releasing of pain or anything like that.
It's it's just that there's this thing that is occurring. And, you know, for us normal everyday human beings, death is certainly
something to be avoided and to kind of be horrified by in a way.
(10:03):
But these people aren't horrified by it.
If we look at in the penal colony, for example,
we have this officer who's constructed this machine, which is basically a machine of torture. You
strap someone into this, it's able to feed them. It's kind of like inscribing
etches into their skin and their back. But this machine can rotate them so it can create like this kind of scarification, if you imagine that. But without the healing of the scars, it's just cutting into them and creating all of these patterns on their bodies. And they can survive for like eight hours.
(10:37):
They don't bleed to death. And it's,
you know, this rather just like gruesome machine.
And it's not the torture that he enjoys. He doesn't seem to really enjoy the pain of the person in it.
And especially if, like, they,
you know, the whole point of that machine was also in that story was that the person didn't deserve it. The condemned man was just a random guy.
(11:02):
And so we see, like, when we're getting into the stories,
we see, okay, it's not that death is the
outcome that is desired. It's not the pain or the torture. This man is obsessed with this machine,
which produces
the death and the pain and the suffering.
Very, very weird. And it's kind of hard to read in that sort of sense.
(11:26):
The hunger hardest is,
our hunger artist is very similar where it's this man who's starving himself to death.
He goes for thirty days, sixty days, something like that. And they always cut it there because that's when the
audience's attention is waning.
But he wants to go further. He wants to prove himself that in this kind of perfection of his art form,
(11:48):
which the ultimate conclusion is death, he's going to die. He's going to starve himself to death. But it's this
it's not necessarily pleasure that he gets from proving others wrong or
beating his own limits.
It's this
I yeah, very strange, you know, obsession. I think that's the thing. It's a strange obsession
(12:10):
with something that will lead to death, and they're not concerned about the death part of things.
I guess a modern day example would sort of be, you know, people who go into extreme sports where they do ever increasing
things
which will get them even closer
to to this,
I guess like
(12:31):
most extreme thing that they can do. And I'm thinking of people who do base jumping, wingsuit diving through tiny, narrow gaps and rocks or buildings
of, you know, extreme sports
of stuntmen, things like this. But for them, they at least get this payoff of like a huge adrenaline rush. Whereas the people in this, they don't really seem to find this ecstasy. It's it's not a
(12:54):
that's not the word I would describe as to to what they're feeling.
Another
example of this and what strikes me is very surreal, weird, eerie
and bordering on disgusting is the Uzumaki by Junji Ito,
which had a recent Netflix an, adaptation. This was a a manga, and it's basically this obsession with spirals.
(13:17):
And you see all these people getting contorted into weird shapes, but somehow still being alive.
I guess that's the other thing. It's the
the people in this book,
and and the stories.
And I'm not really talking about the stoker here, because that doesn't involve any of this. That's more social
awkwardness,
I guess, if you had to put it. But the people in this book, they're they're putting themselves into these
(13:42):
weird,
unnatural states where they're still alive as well. And that's the other weird thing where it's like, you know, the the guy who's starving or Gregor is the is the cockroach,
they're still alive. And you're like that that thing that whatever that is should not be alive right now. How is it alive?
Which is introducing this aspect of,
(14:04):
the unknown, this unknown knowledge of,
you know, something is very, very wrong here because they are still alive in this extreme situation.
Yet
they they keep on living and we don't know what it is or how they got there.
So I guess that's all getting into this surreal surrealism.
His style is not gory.
(14:27):
It's not like reading American Psycho where you're hearing about, you know, eyeballs getting scooped out or hatcheting,
you know, into into flesh and things like this.
You can read this without being too disgusted.
Apart from
the cockroach,
that was rather disgusting, like
listing off this giant cockroach. That's probably my number one
(14:49):
ick animal
for me. So,
yeah, that that certainly was kind of just like, oh, I don't like reading about him squirting juices everywhere and a rotten apple stuck in his back and shit like this. So
that,
is is kind of grossed gross. But for everything else, it's more just a curiosity.
(15:10):
It deals with things with that are kind of
shock
and horrified
about if it occurred in real life. But
because it's in this book and in this weird style, you kind of go along with it. So that's that's all I have to say, I guess, about surrealism and Franz Kafka's style of creating this. Let's jump on to the actual author himself, some extra details.
(15:33):
We've covered him before in this channel with my book review of the trial,
which I highly recommend.
He was Austrian Czech born in 1883,
died in 1924, so relatively young.
And he wrote in German, obviously, this book being in
English. Now my German is kind of okay. So if I'd remembered that this was actually a translation from German, I might have just waited until I was in Germany to pick up the original,
(16:02):
German
writing. So that was a little whoopsie on my part.
His friend
was,
after he died, was meant to burn and
get eliminate, eradicate many of his unpublished works and manuscripts and essays.
He didn't do that.
(16:22):
The reason for that is, I guess, he thought they were works of art and and wanted them to continue. We'll skip aside the ethics of that. I don't actually believe any of them were
of ones that were unpublished in his lifetime in this book. So these were all of ones that he kind of endorsed himself as a writer.
But there's certainly things in here where I'm like, you know what? Maybe if they actually were part of that, they probably should have been burnt because there was really nothing nothing going on.
(16:53):
So Michael Hoffman at the end, the translator,
he's got some notes on the text, like a little afterward and things, and he gets more into, I guess, some of these stories of
what you could perhaps look into this, for example, and for insight. And you might want to do that if you want a better
review of of the themes of the book
(17:16):
rather than the actual style of of what I was talking about with the surrealism that he's creating.
And the reason for this is because me personally,
there was a lot of stupid, boring shit in this book.
The ones which had a bit of meat, you know, that were 10 plus pages were were fine. And I talked about them and they
(17:36):
kept me interested enough.
But
I have a hard time of thinking of things that laid that were less boring than this.
There was not a string single note of anything other than boredom when I was reading
many, many of these stories.
Now this is because some of them are just purely, you know,
(18:00):
one one page. I could even read out this one here. Looking at distractedly.
What shall we do in the spring days that are now rapidly approaching? This morning, the sky was great, but if you go over to the window now, you'll be surprised and rest your cheek against the window lock. Down on the street, you'll see the light of the now setting sun on the face of the girl walking along and turning to look over her shoulder, and then you'll see the shadow of the man rapidly coming up behind her. Then the man has overtaken her, and the girl's face is quite dazzling.
(18:26):
What what what can you do with that? What can you take with that? And if you receive
30 of those in a row,
I certainly was going,
this is really boring.
And I think the reason for this was that there was no
there was no particular note of
interest in them for me. His style, as I mentioned,
(18:48):
is kind of a slow build up and it relies on these situations that are
surreal, that are, you know, an ordinary situation, but with a real twist to it. And it's the way that the people react kind of normally to it or just
go along with it. There's no quite asking of how Gregor Sampson became a cockroach. There's no questioning how they knew that he was the cockroach.
(19:12):
There's no immediate reaction of trying to kill this monster, which I thought would be the normal thing to do.
And
the reason that it's kind of interesting is that it builds up. It takes a bit of time. But when you're writing something that's only one to three pages long,
that I feel like that lacks that surrealism, that building up of the thing. And so all you're left with is just a really mundane story, which is kind of weird. I mean, that had nothing in it, which was surreal, but some of the others did,
(19:44):
and with that twist. But yeah, it's kind of hard to just go like, oh, this is good.
Josephine the singer, for example, that one's a little bit longer. I think that was closer to 10 to 15 pages right at the end.
And essentially, this is about a singer,
Josephine the singer or the mouse people. And it was just under 20 pages.
It is 17 pages.
(20:05):
And basically, it's the story about this singer who
is kinda awful. She just whistles a lot of the time. She's not a great singer.
Yet the people who
are in her city or town
are kind of like enamored, drawn to her. They they support her as an artist. They'll go to her, you know, theaters and and applaud her and things like this, but they're all rather bored. None of them think she's a good singer.
(20:32):
And
as I'm just reading this 17 pages of this thing, I just go on like, this is the most inane prattle I've ever heard. I what is the point of this?
Another one,
which was related to the law and the doorkeeper,
and it's this man trying to get access through this door and he knows as many doors.
(20:54):
But this doorkeeper is telling him like, no, no, no, you can't go through here. And
basically the man ends up dying.
And it's something to do with death. It's something to do with the law. But
good luck trying to
establish figure out
the meaning within that, if there's any meaning in it at all, which I wouldn't be surprised with because I'm not sure
(21:17):
Franz Kafka actually wrote for these things to actually have meaning.
And that would kind of suggest
sense to me because he himself
throughout his lifetime was very neurotic about what he was writing and whether it was good enough,
whether it made sense, like whether it would strike a note or something like that. And it's probably best I wasn't a critic or a reviewer back in those days because I probably would have been saying like,
(21:44):
what what's the point of this thing? I don't
I don't I don't think it has a point. So let's jump into my summary. Similar books recommendations.
I've got mixed feelings on this book, which largely
tend towards the negative.
I can't say that I'm impressed with the style.
There's a couple of things going against them. One, I'm not into surreal horror. Horror is certainly one of my least favorite genres just in in general.
(22:11):
And this surreal style is very, very similar to it,
but without the gore, I guess, aspect of it or the jump scares.
And so number one, that didn't really appeal to me. Number two
is that while the style is distinctive,
I didn't just get anything from this book. It didn't really provide any insights into death
(22:33):
or into
torture or into neuroticism
or into giant cockroaches.
And
the characters themselves are rather
plain, boring, mundane. There's nothing of them where I'm like
attaching myself to.
So my main reasoning
for reading this was to get access to Metamorphosis,
(22:54):
to
read that that story of his, which is one of his most well known,
if not the most well known.
Yet I came away from it just going like,
yeah,
his seminal work really didn't appeal to me that much.
Another problem, and this is more of a Chiron problem than a Franz Kafka problem, is I just don't really enjoy collections of short stories. So now I'm kind of setting myself up for failure by reading this, but I really wanted to to try out Metamorphosis.
(23:25):
So overall,
like, the book was pretty subpart of me. I
I probably should have stopped reading many of the short stories and just gone to Metamorphosis,
and that's my fault. But anyway, I'm giving it one and a half out of 10. Metamorphosis
and Other Stories by Franz Kafka.
I I I can't recommend it. I can't recommend it. What I can recommend is The Trial.
(23:49):
I really enjoyed The Trial.
It's still got this very similar style to it, and it is bizarre.
But the character, the length of time that is spent on the story fleshing it out,
I feel was really good. And that is one book that I would recommend checking out.
I,
for some reason, always confuse Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. So,
(24:12):
you know, I've done a a book review of The Stranger, for example, of Camus before on this channel and another one of his books, which is escaping my mind at the moment, the plague, I think it was.
And
I would recommend checking him out as well. It's kind of similar, kind of similar style. So those are probably the the couple of things I would suggest there.
(24:34):
And, yeah, I'm gonna leave
you for today with the last request of value for value section. I do all of this upfront,
free available anytime, anywhere for anyone. No subscriptions,
no paywalls,
no, you know, promoted books or anything on this. It's just the things that I am drawn to. And my friend, my co host, Juan as well.
(24:56):
And we do all of this upfront and just ask that you return some value. So, you know, the easiest ways of doing this are sharing the podcast
word-of-mouth via a friend or sending them a link or something like this,
leaving a review yourself of what you thought of it,
the like, subscribe, all those things. I would love to know your,
(25:16):
book recommendations. What do you think I would enjoy based on reading this or not reading this? What are some things I should stay away from? If you think that, I I might be drawn into something which
is not worthwhile,
We'd love to know all of these things.
And then finally,
you can support us monetarily. There is a PayPal link down below.
(25:37):
I've also changed our website slightly. So me and mortals podcasts,
with an s at right at the end, .com/support,
and you can learn how to support us there. We actually did have someone this last week. This was Martin Lindoscope. Gonna shout him out for,
sending through some Sadoshi's whilst listening to one of the book reviews. So you can do that on a modern podcasting app.
(25:59):
And, yeah,
I do these live and really enjoy doing them live on 11AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday. I think I've got two more,
maybe three,
before I'm going traveling.
And there's gonna probably be a bit of a gap whilst traveling,
because I'm not gonna be in a fixed location. So it's gonna be very hard to do kind of consistent book reviews,
(26:23):
especially at a consistent time. So I'll look out for that in the three weeks time. There might be a little bit of a gap for about two months, and then I'll be back into a regular schedule when I get back home.
What am I reading at the moment? I'm currently
midway through A Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde,
And that's it at the moment. I'm kind of, you know, winding up, getting ready to travel. So that's what I'm spending a lot of my time on. So
(26:50):
that's it for today. Thank you very much for joining me, everyone. I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. I hope you haven't turned into a giant cockroach because I will stomp you. And ciao for now. Until the next time. Bye.
Boy, your cockroaches gross.
Welcome,
everyone, to another episode of the mere models book reviews. I'm your host here, Kyrin, live on the 04/23/2025.
And as you might surmise, this is the podcast where I lovingly caress cockroaches.
(00:23):
No. No. None of that's going on today. But you will find a cockroach in this book here, Metamorphosis
and Other Stories by Franz Kafka.
So this book was published in 1915.
I have the translated version into English. It was originally published in German,
by Michael Hoffman.
And it's 265
(00:44):
pages in length. No pictures or anything in,
like that in here. There is a fair bit of blank space just because the all the
the titles of some of these things, they they kinda bleed into each other. So you do have a lot of blank space in the book. I'd say it took me about six hours of reading to get through in total.
Now it's a collection of prose, poems, short stories, sketches,
(01:06):
allegories,
novelts,
very short and random things which you'll find within here. I did a little rough count, and I think there's probably about 40 short stories,
with most of them being, like, one to three pages long.
And then a couple four or five, which are closer to like 10 to 40 ish pages.
(01:27):
So there's a lot to go within this book. A couple of the names here are things like The Sudden Walk, The Businessman,
the way home dresses, the trees,
the stoker
and a fratricide, 11 sons, a little woman, etcetera, etcetera.
There's a lot to go on here. The longest that you'll find within is of the titular metamorphosis,
(01:48):
which features
the ever handsome Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes up in his bed as a cockroach. And you wanna say, like, and then hilarity
ensues.
Unfortunately, no. It's rather grim. It's rather surreal. It's rather weird. And that is the style of of mister Franz Kafka. And
I guess there's a, like, a dry humor that you could say within these, but a lot of this stuff is is really, really random. Like, 11 sons, for example, is just a guy listing off his 11 sons and
(02:20):
why he likes or dislikes each each one of them and their personalities.
You've got,
things like, I think it was the way home or, the men running past, which would just be like a guy gets followed on the streets to a party, and then he's, like, trying to get rid of this person. And it's like, oh, this is awkward. Like, how do I get rid of him?
A lot of random stuff within this book. It's very hard
(02:42):
to say
exactly what each is about because it would take too long because they are short stories. You know, my explanation of it would take longer than just reading the story. So let's jump into the main theme for today, and that is the surreal. What the hell is the surreal?
And I guess we're going to really be focusing on
Kafka's style
(03:03):
as the actual theme for today,
because it is very distinct
and you can see it throughout most of these things.
Some of the short stories, which are only a page or two pages long, not really.
But I'm gonna be focusing on the four or five ones of length, which I mentioned. So these are
(03:24):
The Judgment
let me get them in order. The Judgment, a story for f,
which was in 1913.
The Stoker of Fragment, 1913 as well. Metamorphosis,
1913. In The Penal Colony, published in 1919.
And,
there was one other,
A Hunger Artist,
which was published in 1924.
(03:45):
And that one is slightly a little bit different from the others.
And what are these about? Well, okay. The judgment is a man realizes his father is insane. He keeps, you know, this man is talking about this friend that he's had from a long time ago.
And he kind of has this relationship with his father, which he thinks is great.
(04:05):
And then upon talking with his father and about this friend,
his father goes into, like, this insane rambling rant.
And the man, I guess, is kind of questioning, like, oh, wait, is is this all a conspiracy against me? Or is my father insane? Am I insane? That's kind of the the feeling you get. The stoker, which is a young man on a boat traveling from Germany to America,
(04:29):
is
a,
loses his things, goes back into the ship, meets this guy, the stoker, who he kind of
is not enamored by in some sort of way or who he likes
and helps him on his quest for
vengeance
against the, his overseer, who he feels is on treating him harshly and gets into, like, a big mishap, put it, putting himself into other people's situations.
(04:54):
Metamorphosis
I've already talked about,
but we see, Gregor Samsara in this cockroach body,
trying to live in this small apartment as a giant cockroach. And the disgust of the I would say the,
well
intentioned,
the adequate, the
appropriate. That's the word I'm thinking for the appropriate disgust of his own family members at his transformation.
(05:19):
We also have in the penal colony, which is a sadistic officer showing off his torture machine to a traveler
and then a hunger artist, which is a starving performer
who stops himself intentionally. This kind of
feels unappreciated,
from the lay public of his art that he is doing and that people don't understand, like, the greatness that he's doing.
(05:42):
So I guess what
with all of these stories,
what I there's this kind of atmosphere. It's it's menacing. It's foreboding. It's
it's rather strange. And,
I think the reason this gets created is not because of the subversion of the,
of the people in the story. It's like the subversion of our expectations
(06:07):
and watching these people within the story because
they get themselves into very bizarre situations.
And it's almost like it's just from the get go. You start reading the story. You know, I'll I'll read out the
the first sentence of metaphor metamorphosis
because that is kind of a
well, well known,
(06:27):
one. So here we go. When Gregor Samso awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.
Alright. You get right into it with that one. So
I think there's
what we see is that these people are a little bit neurotic. We're typically
receiving the story from the point of view of someone. So it'll be from Greg or Samsa. It'll be from the traveler in the penal colony. It'll be from the point of view of the young man in the stoker,
(06:57):
the other young man in the, in the,
what was it, the judgment.
And
they're they're usually pretty neurotic. They're thinking about things too much. They're, like, overthinking things. Oh, if I do this, what's this other person gonna do? And, you know, that's that's kind of reasonable. If you've experienced any neuroticism in your life, if you've ever experienced social anxiety or wondering, oh, like if I do this or you want to do something, but you're kind of like afraid of talking to the pretty girl or or, you know, it's a group setting and you're like, oh, I don't want to barge in, but, you know, this sort of thing, you'll you'll understand these sorts of feelings.
(07:32):
But what is different is that
when they get themselves into something which you would rightly think is like, am I dreaming right now? This is very not normal. Is this insane? Is this someone pulling a prank on me? Like, what the hell is going on? They don't spend that much time with that. They adapt to a very extreme situation and then just continue on as normal. So Gregor Sampler, for example, the cockroach,
(07:59):
his immediate reactions are like, I'm going to be late for work. Shit.
You know, how can I explain this to my boss? Oh, my family's going to be embarrassed or, you know, I don't want to inconvenience them
by being a giant cockroach
in this room.
And
so it's it's this really weird thing where you go, okay, they're in a very mundane situation
(08:22):
or
they're treating an extreme situation as mundane is probably the better way of saying it,
Even though
life continues as normal for everyone in the book, it's it's kind of
there's many things I can think of this kind of like The X Files, for example.
There was a show in here in Australia called Round the Twist, which is very similar, where it's like these magical things happen, but you're
(08:48):
it's not magical in the sense of wonderment. It's magical in the sense of like
eerie as probably the best way of putting it. So,
you know, they don't find anything wrong with what is happening is is probably the strangest thing
of all when you encounter these stories, which are like,
oh, this is something's a bit wrong here. So that menacing undertone, how does it get created and what makes it surreal?
(09:13):
You know, I think that surreal
portion is if I had to look up the definition, I'm sure it's something like a situation that does seem normal in some sort of respect, but has a very like a twist to it.
And
you see this, you know, there's everyday locations and events, but
the main common theme I really see coming up through all of this is death or some sort of desire for death that kind of gradually creeps in.
(09:41):
And it's not that death is some sort of blissful
end state to be achieved, like a nirvana
or a releasing of pain or anything like that.
It's it's just that there's this thing that is occurring. And, you know, for us normal everyday human beings, death is certainly
something to be avoided and to kind of be horrified by in a way.
(10:03):
But these people aren't horrified by it.
If we look at in the penal colony, for example,
we have this officer who's constructed this machine, which is basically a machine of torture. You
strap someone into this, it's able to feed them. It's kind of like inscribing
etches into their skin and their back. But this machine can rotate them so it can create like this kind of scarification, if you imagine that. But without the healing of the scars, it's just cutting into them and creating all of these patterns on their bodies. And they can survive for like eight hours.
(10:37):
They don't bleed to death. And it's,
you know, this rather just like gruesome machine.
And it's not the torture that he enjoys. He doesn't seem to really enjoy the pain of the person in it.
And especially if, like, they,
you know, the whole point of that machine was also in that story was that the person didn't deserve it. The condemned man was just a random guy.
(11:02):
And so we see, like, when we're getting into the stories,
we see, okay, it's not that death is the
outcome that is desired. It's not the pain or the torture. This man is obsessed with this machine,
which produces
the death and the pain and the suffering.
Very, very weird. And it's kind of hard to read in that sort of sense.
(11:26):
The hunger hardest is,
our hunger artist is very similar where it's this man who's starving himself to death.
He goes for thirty days, sixty days, something like that. And they always cut it there because that's when the
audience's attention is waning.
But he wants to go further. He wants to prove himself that in this kind of perfection of his art form,
(11:48):
which the ultimate conclusion is death, he's going to die. He's going to starve himself to death. But it's this
it's not necessarily pleasure that he gets from proving others wrong or
beating his own limits.
It's this
I yeah, very strange, you know, obsession. I think that's the thing. It's a strange obsession
(12:10):
with something that will lead to death, and they're not concerned about the death part of things.
I guess a modern day example would sort of be, you know, people who go into extreme sports where they do ever increasing
things
which will get them even closer
to to this,
I guess like
(12:31):
most extreme thing that they can do. And I'm thinking of people who do base jumping, wingsuit diving through tiny, narrow gaps and rocks or buildings
of, you know, extreme sports
of stuntmen, things like this. But for them, they at least get this payoff of like a huge adrenaline rush. Whereas the people in this, they don't really seem to find this ecstasy. It's it's not a
(12:54):
that's not the word I would describe as to to what they're feeling.
Another
example of this and what strikes me is very surreal, weird, eerie
and bordering on disgusting is the Uzumaki by Junji Ito,
which had a recent Netflix an, adaptation. This was a a manga, and it's basically this obsession with spirals.
(13:17):
And you see all these people getting contorted into weird shapes, but somehow still being alive.
I guess that's the other thing. It's the
the people in this book,
and and the stories.
And I'm not really talking about the stoker here, because that doesn't involve any of this. That's more social
awkwardness,
I guess, if you had to put it. But the people in this book, they're they're putting themselves into these
(13:42):
weird,
unnatural states where they're still alive as well. And that's the other weird thing where it's like, you know, the the guy who's starving or Gregor is the is the cockroach,
they're still alive. And you're like that that thing that whatever that is should not be alive right now. How is it alive?
Which is introducing this aspect of,
(14:04):
the unknown, this unknown knowledge of,
you know, something is very, very wrong here because they are still alive in this extreme situation.
Yet
they they keep on living and we don't know what it is or how they got there.
So I guess that's all getting into this surreal surrealism.
His style is not gory.
(14:27):
It's not like reading American Psycho where you're hearing about, you know, eyeballs getting scooped out or hatcheting,
you know, into into flesh and things like this.
You can read this without being too disgusted.
Apart from
the cockroach,
that was rather disgusting, like
listing off this giant cockroach. That's probably my number one
(14:49):
ick animal
for me. So,
yeah, that that certainly was kind of just like, oh, I don't like reading about him squirting juices everywhere and a rotten apple stuck in his back and shit like this. So
that,
is is kind of grossed gross. But for everything else, it's more just a curiosity.
(15:10):
It deals with things with that are kind of
shock
and horrified
about if it occurred in real life. But
because it's in this book and in this weird style, you kind of go along with it. So that's that's all I have to say, I guess, about surrealism and Franz Kafka's style of creating this. Let's jump on to the actual author himself, some extra details.
(15:33):
We've covered him before in this channel with my book review of the trial,
which I highly recommend.
He was Austrian Czech born in 1883,
died in 1924, so relatively young.
And he wrote in German, obviously, this book being in
English. Now my German is kind of okay. So if I'd remembered that this was actually a translation from German, I might have just waited until I was in Germany to pick up the original,
(16:02):
German
writing. So that was a little whoopsie on my part.
His friend
was,
after he died, was meant to burn and
get eliminate, eradicate many of his unpublished works and manuscripts and essays.
He didn't do that.
(16:22):
The reason for that is, I guess, he thought they were works of art and and wanted them to continue. We'll skip aside the ethics of that. I don't actually believe any of them were
of ones that were unpublished in his lifetime in this book. So these were all of ones that he kind of endorsed himself as a writer.
But there's certainly things in here where I'm like, you know what? Maybe if they actually were part of that, they probably should have been burnt because there was really nothing nothing going on.
(16:53):
So Michael Hoffman at the end, the translator,
he's got some notes on the text, like a little afterward and things, and he gets more into, I guess, some of these stories of
what you could perhaps look into this, for example, and for insight. And you might want to do that if you want a better
review of of the themes of the book
(17:16):
rather than the actual style of of what I was talking about with the surrealism that he's creating.
And the reason for this is because me personally,
there was a lot of stupid, boring shit in this book.
The ones which had a bit of meat, you know, that were 10 plus pages were were fine. And I talked about them and they
(17:36):
kept me interested enough.
But
I have a hard time of thinking of things that laid that were less boring than this.
There was not a string single note of anything other than boredom when I was reading
many, many of these stories.
Now this is because some of them are just purely, you know,
(18:00):
one one page. I could even read out this one here. Looking at distractedly.
What shall we do in the spring days that are now rapidly approaching? This morning, the sky was great, but if you go over to the window now, you'll be surprised and rest your cheek against the window lock. Down on the street, you'll see the light of the now setting sun on the face of the girl walking along and turning to look over her shoulder, and then you'll see the shadow of the man rapidly coming up behind her. Then the man has overtaken her, and the girl's face is quite dazzling.
(18:26):
What what what can you do with that? What can you take with that? And if you receive
30 of those in a row,
I certainly was going,
this is really boring.
And I think the reason for this was that there was no
there was no particular note of
interest in them for me. His style, as I mentioned,
(18:48):
is kind of a slow build up and it relies on these situations that are
surreal, that are, you know, an ordinary situation, but with a real twist to it. And it's the way that the people react kind of normally to it or just
go along with it. There's no quite asking of how Gregor Sampson became a cockroach. There's no questioning how they knew that he was the cockroach.
(19:12):
There's no immediate reaction of trying to kill this monster, which I thought would be the normal thing to do.
And
the reason that it's kind of interesting is that it builds up. It takes a bit of time. But when you're writing something that's only one to three pages long,
that I feel like that lacks that surrealism, that building up of the thing. And so all you're left with is just a really mundane story, which is kind of weird. I mean, that had nothing in it, which was surreal, but some of the others did,
(19:44):
and with that twist. But yeah, it's kind of hard to just go like, oh, this is good.
Josephine the singer, for example, that one's a little bit longer. I think that was closer to 10 to 15 pages right at the end.
And essentially, this is about a singer,
Josephine the singer or the mouse people. And it was just under 20 pages.
It is 17 pages.
(20:05):
And basically, it's the story about this singer who
is kinda awful. She just whistles a lot of the time. She's not a great singer.
Yet the people who
are in her city or town
are kind of like enamored, drawn to her. They they support her as an artist. They'll go to her, you know, theaters and and applaud her and things like this, but they're all rather bored. None of them think she's a good singer.
(20:32):
And
as I'm just reading this 17 pages of this thing, I just go on like, this is the most inane prattle I've ever heard. I what is the point of this?
Another one,
which was related to the law and the doorkeeper,
and it's this man trying to get access through this door and he knows as many doors.
(20:54):
But this doorkeeper is telling him like, no, no, no, you can't go through here. And
basically the man ends up dying.
And it's something to do with death. It's something to do with the law. But
good luck trying to
establish figure out
the meaning within that, if there's any meaning in it at all, which I wouldn't be surprised with because I'm not sure
(21:17):
Franz Kafka actually wrote for these things to actually have meaning.
And that would kind of suggest
sense to me because he himself
throughout his lifetime was very neurotic about what he was writing and whether it was good enough,
whether it made sense, like whether it would strike a note or something like that. And it's probably best I wasn't a critic or a reviewer back in those days because I probably would have been saying like,
(21:44):
what what's the point of this thing? I don't
I don't I don't think it has a point. So let's jump into my summary. Similar books recommendations.
I've got mixed feelings on this book, which largely
tend towards the negative.
I can't say that I'm impressed with the style.
There's a couple of things going against them. One, I'm not into surreal horror. Horror is certainly one of my least favorite genres just in in general.
(22:11):
And this surreal style is very, very similar to it,
but without the gore, I guess, aspect of it or the jump scares.
And so number one, that didn't really appeal to me. Number two
is that while the style is distinctive,
I didn't just get anything from this book. It didn't really provide any insights into death
(22:33):
or into
torture or into neuroticism
or into giant cockroaches.
And
the characters themselves are rather
plain, boring, mundane. There's nothing of them where I'm like
attaching myself to.
So my main reasoning
for reading this was to get access to Metamorphosis,
(22:54):
to
read that that story of his, which is one of his most well known,
if not the most well known.
Yet I came away from it just going like,
yeah,
his seminal work really didn't appeal to me that much.
Another problem, and this is more of a Chiron problem than a Franz Kafka problem, is I just don't really enjoy collections of short stories. So now I'm kind of setting myself up for failure by reading this, but I really wanted to to try out Metamorphosis.
(23:25):
So overall,
like, the book was pretty subpart of me. I
I probably should have stopped reading many of the short stories and just gone to Metamorphosis,
and that's my fault. But anyway, I'm giving it one and a half out of 10. Metamorphosis
and Other Stories by Franz Kafka.
I I I can't recommend it. I can't recommend it. What I can recommend is The Trial.
(23:49):
I really enjoyed The Trial.
It's still got this very similar style to it, and it is bizarre.
But the character, the length of time that is spent on the story fleshing it out,
I feel was really good. And that is one book that I would recommend checking out.
I,
for some reason, always confuse Franz Kafka and Albert Camus. So,
(24:12):
you know, I've done a a book review of The Stranger, for example, of Camus before on this channel and another one of his books, which is escaping my mind at the moment, the plague, I think it was.
And
I would recommend checking him out as well. It's kind of similar, kind of similar style. So those are probably the the couple of things I would suggest there.
(24:34):
And, yeah, I'm gonna leave
you for today with the last request of value for value section. I do all of this upfront,
free available anytime, anywhere for anyone. No subscriptions,
no paywalls,
no, you know, promoted books or anything on this. It's just the things that I am drawn to. And my friend, my co host, Juan as well.
(24:56):
And we do all of this upfront and just ask that you return some value. So, you know, the easiest ways of doing this are sharing the podcast
word-of-mouth via a friend or sending them a link or something like this,
leaving a review yourself of what you thought of it,
the like, subscribe, all those things. I would love to know your,
(25:16):
book recommendations. What do you think I would enjoy based on reading this or not reading this? What are some things I should stay away from? If you think that, I I might be drawn into something which
is not worthwhile,
We'd love to know all of these things.
And then finally,
you can support us monetarily. There is a PayPal link down below.
(25:37):
I've also changed our website slightly. So me and mortals podcasts,
with an s at right at the end, .com/support,
and you can learn how to support us there. We actually did have someone this last week. This was Martin Lindoscope. Gonna shout him out for,
sending through some Sadoshi's whilst listening to one of the book reviews. So you can do that on a modern podcasting app.
(25:59):
And, yeah,
I do these live and really enjoy doing them live on 11AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday. I think I've got two more,
maybe three,
before I'm going traveling.
And there's gonna probably be a bit of a gap whilst traveling,
because I'm not gonna be in a fixed location. So it's gonna be very hard to do kind of consistent book reviews,
(26:23):
especially at a consistent time. So I'll look out for that in the three weeks time. There might be a little bit of a gap for about two months, and then I'll be back into a regular schedule when I get back home.
What am I reading at the moment? I'm currently
midway through A Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde,
And that's it at the moment. I'm kind of, you know, winding up, getting ready to travel. So that's what I'm spending a lot of my time on. So
(26:50):
that's it for today. Thank you very much for joining me, everyone. I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. I hope you haven't turned into a giant cockroach because I will stomp you. And ciao for now. Until the next time. Bye.
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