The Metamorphosis
Parton Press, 1937.
First English language edition. Original blue cloth backed black boards with black titles on the spine and blue title label on the upper cover. A fine copy with just a touch of rubbing to the spine ends but a very bright, crisp example.
Originally published under the title of Die Verwandlung in Leipzig in 1915, it was translated into English for this edition by A. L. Lloyd. Its perceptions make it one of the most significant works in the development of twentieth century consciousness. Vladimir Nabokov, who ranked The Metamorphosis second only to Ulysses in his critique of twentieth century prose, described Kafka as, "the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him."
Born and brought up in Prague at a time when Czechoslovakia was trying to come to terms with the modernism of the surrounding world, Kafka was the son of a loud, robust, bourgeois father. This relationship was an uneasy one for the thin, academic and often awkward Kafka, and paternal themes permeate a lot of Kafka's work particularly this, his most famous work.
It tells the tale of Gregor Samsa, a young travelling salesman who lives with his father and sister. He wakes up to find he has changed into a beetle, and cannot move easily or communicate with his family, who consequently turn their backs on him.
Partly autobiographical, in an allegorical sense, it expresses Kafka's uneasy relationship with his family and is a reaction to a bourgeois and materialistic society in which the intellectual is regarded as 'vermin' to be restricted and crushed by economic and social demands.
Stock ID: 32256
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