In the Library
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka, 1915
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by David Wyllie
- Original
- Original de
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 22k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Trial
Franz Kafka
Kafka expands the nightmare from one room to an entire city, but the logic is the same.
£1.99
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's narrator retreats into the same suffocating isolation and self-disgust as Gregor Samsa, but the transformation happens entirely inside a mind rather than a body.
£1.99
About the book
He wakes on his back, hard as armour, his thin legs waving helplessly above him, and his first clear thought is not terror but the train he is about to miss for work. Franz Kafka gives literature its most monstrous premise and then flatly refuses to explain it; the real horror is never that Gregor Samsa has become an insect, but that his family adjusts. Watch the love curdle into housekeeping: the locked door, the rotting scraps shoved under it, the sister whose violin he loved learning to flinch. This is the most exact thing ever written about being wanted only for what you provide, and about what remains of a person once the providing stops. Few books are so quietly unbearable about the small room you are kept in, the apple festering in your back, the morning they decide everyone would be lighter if you were simply gone.