Dönüşüm (The Metamorphosis)

Careful: this gives away how the book ends.

Seventy pages. Finished in one sitting. It stayed on my mind for months.

The opening

Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a bug.

Kafka does not explain what happened, and does not even say clearly what kind of bug it is: he uses something like "a monstrous vermin." He specifically wrote to his publisher that no picture of a bug should go on the cover.

The first thing Gregor thinks about is not what he has become. It is being late for work.

He calculates that he will miss the train. He thinks about what his boss will say. He remembers that in five years he has not been sick for a single day.

Nobody asks

What hit me is not that he is a bug. It is that nobody asks "why."

The family is shocked, frightened, disgusted. But none of them asks "how did this happen, will it reverse, what can we do."

They move straight to practical matters: who will work, how will we pay the rent, where will we keep him, the lodgers must not see him.

Kafka does not write a scene of explanation, and the book is this unsettling because he does not. The question that goes unasked says more than the ones that are asked.

Gregor's reaction

This is the real matter.

He does not get angry. He does not blame his family. He apologizes to them for being a burden.

He tries to stay quiet in his room so as not to disturb anyone. He hides under the couch because the sight of him frightens his sister. He tries not to make noise while he eats.

In the end he thinks of relieving them by dying, and after thinking it, he dies.

My chest tightens as I write this sentence, because I know that logic.

Why I know it

Gregor knew why he was loved: he brought in money.

He was the one paying off the family's debt. He was the one taking care of the household. He was going to send his sister to the conservatory, and that plan is the only real expression of love in the book.

The moment he could no longer earn, the love ended too.

First he was shut in his room. Then his room was turned into a storeroom. Then his feeding was forgotten. In the end his death became a relief.

Someone who measures their own worth by what they produce arrives at the same conclusion when they can no longer produce.

The feeling that you have no right to be tired. The name of what you feel when you cannot do anything in a bad week.

Grete

His sister, and the book's bitterest transformation is actually hers.

At first she is the only one who looks after him. She tries out what he eats, tidies his room, takes care of him.

Then she gets tired. Then she is disgusted. In the end she is the one who says "we have to get rid of this," and she speaks of him not as "he" but as "it."

Kafka shows this shift step by step, without any commentary. Nobody is evil. Everyone gets tired.

The last scene

After Gregor dies, the family goes out together for the first time.

They get on a train, the weather is good, they talk about their jobs and their future. They plan to rent a new home. The parents notice how beautiful Grete has become and that it is time to find her a husband.

Kafka ends it there.

These are the coldest sentences in the book, and it is there that you understand exactly what is being told: the family is better off without Gregor.

I learned later that it is funny

It is said that Kafka read this aloud to his friends, laughing.

I was surprised, then looked again and saw it.

Gregor trying to work out his six legs, not knowing which to move first. The boss coming to the house and asking through the door why he did not come to work. The family's scramble to hide the bug from the lodgers. The father throwing apples.

Tragedy and absurdity stand together and you cannot separate them. I suppose this is what makes Kafka Kafka.

Its shortness

That matters on this list.

I read it at a time when I was in no state to start a long novel, and that is exactly why I was able to read it.

Seventy pages, but its weight is not measured in pages. For a week after finishing it, it kept coming to mind.

Kafka wanted this text to be published, but before he died he left instructions in his will for all of his unpublished writings to be burned. His friend Max Brod did not carry out the will.