Metamorphosis and Other Stories

I know exactly how Grete feels. I have a bug for a brother, too. =_=

Writers from Prague tend to leave indelible impressions on my mind. I'll admit it, I have a pro-Prague bias, I love all things European with the intimacy only a foreigner can achieve. Kafka and Kundera, they are inevitably infused with some of the magic of Prague. Their works are steeped in nuance, they play with overtones and instil their words with ambiguity. All stories are so inherently beautiful in their own right, the act of writing reviews often consist of little more than the cherry-picking of a few choice adjectives, and private, fragmentary reflections on the impotency of words that stubbornly refuse to convey to others the very emotions they provoke in us. The job of the modern writer, then, is to capture that elusive, transient feeling with their words, to bottle it and sell it. Kafka sells despair, but a subtle form of hopelessness that uses the theme of alienation from the rest of the world to express itself. Leaves you just as, if not more, utterly devastated by the end.