This selection of Kafkas shorter prose writings
Includes:: one of the few works published during his lifetime: the harrowing story of Gregor Samsas overnight transformation into a verminous insect his record of the effect of this sudden metamorphosis on himself & the reaction of his family. It conveys with an unsettling mixture of subjective involvement & objective detachment the complex feelings of guilt affection responsibility & self-doubt that characterise Kafkas perception of intimate emotional relationships
- themes that are continued in the quasi-fictional story The Judgement & the quasi-autobiographical Letter to his Father. Issues of guilt punishment & penance are also treated with startling brutality in the story set in a tropical penal colony that describes in horrific detail a machine designed to inflict an ingenious & barbaric form of execution on victims of a summary & arbitrary justice
- a machine however that in this instance destroys not its intended victim but its zealous operator & simultaneously itself. Kafkas enigmatic fables deal often in dark & quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world in which there appears to be no reassurance no reliable guidance to resolving our existential & emotional uncertainties & anxieties.