When Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollak ‘ I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us…We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forests far from everyone, like a suicide.’ He was probably referring to his works, and the one which stands out the most is THE METAMORPHOSIS.

To attempt to analyze this short literary marvel would be a mistake, it’d be enough to say that every ‘thinking’ person should check it out at sometime or other. The tale in true Kafkaesque style brings our worst nightmare to reality, thereby making us realize that there exists another life that we all lead–the one in our dreams that we seldom give much importance to. Anyone could relate to this at once beautiful, comical, painful and wistful story of an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself transformed into an insect.