Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ rivals Cavendish’s ‘The Blazing World’ as one of the weirdest things I have read, perhaps even trumping it. It follows the story of Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who awoke one morning to find himself a beetle. Kafka explores so much in only 50 pages, from the restrictions of capitalism, extrastentialist imprisonment and the love of one’s family. Metamorphosis is essentially a nightmarish tale of entrapment both physically and by the confines of society. It evoked a lot of sympathy for those on both sides of the beetle dilemma, though also the reader is distanced for Gregor’s state of body and mind is so impossible to comprehend. Metamorphosis is a very weird book.