Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

 

Spent the afternoon and evening reading this. While the title story is distinctly weird--the word I'd go for is "surreal," though that might not have been in the vocabulary yet when Kafka was writing--most of the stories here seem better described as "neurotic." The big takeaway for me is that fiction from 100-ish years ago is going to be *alien*, whatever the intent, and that's almost certainly amplified by works being in translation (though I've had bad experiences with works in translation, this wasn't one). There are some fragmentary-seeming things that don't really resolve, which these days I might be inclined to call "prose poems," and those tend to work less well than the stories, probably because what makes them work in German simply doesn't convey to English.