Gregor manages to unlock the door (without hands, it's tough) and eagerly present himself - in one of the story's most heartbreakingly terrifying speeches, he prattles on about just needing a minute to gather his samples, willfully oblivious to the staggering shock his appearance is having on the people who can finally see what he's become. While he's floundering about what to do, a manager from his office shows up to demand an explanation for his absence. They knock and call out, and he tries to reassure them, but his voice has transformed as well, and they barely understand him. He lives in an apartment in Prague with his parents and his sister Grete, and he's an industrious worker, always on the first train, so they immediately become worried when he doesn't stir from his room (they can't go in and check on him, because his ingrained traveler's instincts have conditioned him to lock the door). We not only read him but need him, in the way that we need Shakespeare or Keats or Twain.The story of The Metamorphosis will be familiar: young traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect with a hard carapace and many writhing legs. In ways we can neither define nor deny, Kafka speaks directly to the neuroses of being human.

It birthed the bleak and pointless ironies of modern literature as surely as the First World War birthed the bleak and pointless ironies of modern statecraft.

It shaped the fiction of that century far more extensively and indelibly than anything written by Wharton or James, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, Roth or Bellow. The combination makes an attractive package, a paperback fit to be slipped into a coat pocket or iPad case and read everywhere.Any attention drawn to Kafka's novella is to the good, since The Metamorphosis is the one of - perhaps the - defining texts of the 20th century. Norton is a sleekly-designed edition of Franz Kakfa's 1915 novella Die Verandlung, here translated by Susan Bernofsky with an Introduction by the Hollywood movie director David Cronenberg and an elegant cover by an illustrator with the lonely solitary name Keenan (many of his - hers? its? - book covers are of the hated 'Just the Facts' variety, showing the title of the book in block letters unaccompanied by any kind of aesthetic, but this one is not only beautiful but ingenious). The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafkatranslated by Susan Bernofsky WW Norton, 2014New from W.

The metamorphosis susan bernofsky