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Chapters (20)
  1. METAMORPHOSIS AND THE TRIAL
  2. History of Collins
  3. Life & Times
  4. METAMORPHOSIS
  5. CHAPTER 1
  6. CHAPTER 2
  7. CHAPTER 3
  8. THE TRIAL
  9. CHAPTER 1
  10. CHAPTER 2
  11. CHAPTER 3
  12. CHAPTER 4
  13. CHAPTER 5
  14. CHAPTER 6
  15. CHAPTER 7
  16. CHAPTER 8
  17. CHAPTER 9
  18. CHAPTER 10
  19. CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASESadapted from the Collins English Dictionary
  20. About the Publisher

Little of Kafka’s work was published in his lifetime and many of his novels – among them The Trial – were never fully completed. When he knew he was dying he made Max Brod his literary executor and instructed him to burn everything. But Brod had always seen the true value of Kafka’s writing, and instead of burning anything he published it all. ‘Franz should have appointed another executor,’ he said by way of justification.

Franz Kafka died in Austria in 1924, preceding both of his parents and his three doomed sisters. Unbeknownst to him, he left a literary legacy that influenced and arguably defined the creative output of the twentieth century: his perceptive insights into mental and emotional oppression – whether by a strict father or a totalitarian regime – are echoed in the works of authors from Orwell and Camus to Nabokov and Coetzee. The boldest novels of the twentieth century were not just dystopian, absurdist and surreal – they were positively Kafkaesque.

METAMORPHOSIS

CHAPTER 1

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

“What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table—Samsa was a travelling salesman—and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.

Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad. “How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense”, he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his right, and in his present state couldn’t get into that position. However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was. He must have tried it a hundred times, shut his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to look at the floundering legs, and only stopped when he began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt before.