NOTICE OF ABSENCE, FORM 7B Employee: SAMSA, G. Reason given: HAS BECOME A MONSTROUS VERMIN Status: UNPAID. OBVIOUSLY.
The Gist
Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who hates his job but keeps doing it because his family needs the money, wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect. His first worry is that he will miss his train. That is the whole of Kafka in one sentence. What follows is less about the bug and more about a family discovering exactly how much they loved the salary. It is 70 pages long and the club still argued about it for three hours.
Exhibit D: Monday. The alarm has been ringing since 6:45. The family would like to know if he is coming to work. He is not coming to work.
What Happens (spoilers, historic)
The waking. Gregor wakes as a vermin and attempts to go to work anyway. His boss turns up at the flat to complain about his punctuality. HR would like a word with everyone involved.
The door. Half the novella is Gregor trying to open a door with no hands while his family panics on the other side. It is somehow both hilarious and the saddest thing ever written.
The apple. His father throws apples at him and one lodges in his back and rots there. The club's group chat simply read "THE APPLE" for a full day.
The violin. Gregor creeps out to hear his sister play and is seen. Grete, his fiercest defender, is the one who finally says it: it has to go. Not he. It.
The ending. Gregor obligingly dies, the charwoman disposes of him, and the family takes a tram to the countryside and stretches in the sunshine, noticing their daughter has grown up nicely. It is the most quietly savage final page in the archive.
Weird Things
Kafka never says what insect Gregor is. When the book was printed he begged the publisher not to put the creature on the cover. Nabokov, who taught the book, drew diagrams and ruled it a beetle roughly the size of a dog.
Kafka reportedly laughed out loud reading early pages to friends. He thought it was funny. He was right, which makes everything worse.
Kafka wanted most of his work burned unread after his death. His friend Max Brod said no. This club owes its fourth meeting to a broken promise.
The famous first line has been translated as vermin, insect, cockroach and "monstrous bug". The club voted. "Vermin" won. Kel abstained, regally.
The Club Record
Katy's pick, chosen, in her words, because it is short. It then generated the longest discussion in club history, mostly about whether the family were monsters or just people, which is also the question the book is asking, so well done Katy, genuinely. The beetle on this page cannot be caught. He has learned from Gregor's mistakes.