It is difficult to review this collection as a whole, because it includes stories spanning Kafka's literary career which are widely different both stylistically and in terms of content. At the same time, I don't want to review each story separately, particularly since there really isn't that much to say about quite a few of them. So I will try to strike a middle ground and just say a few words about each of the most significant stories.

My favorite is probably "The Stoker". It is, perhaps not coincidentally, the most realistic, least "Kafkaesque" of them, almost like something Joseph Conrad might have written. It tells of a young man traveling to America who tries to help a stoker on the ship seek justice from the captain against his boss, who he claims gives preferential treatment to his own countrymen. During the interview with the captain, however, the young man is recognized and carted off by his uncle, an American senator. The story is described as "a fragment", though it is fairly complete in itself (indeed frankly one of the least fragmentary stories here). But though published separately, it was actually the first chapter of Kafka's unfinished novel, Amerika.

Then there is "In the Penal Colony". It is also quite realistic for Kafka, perhaps excessively so, as it becomes almost surreal in its sheer gruesome brutality. It is about a visitor from a civilized nation to a small backward one ruled by a military dictatorship being shown the workings of their execution device, a torture machine which tattoos the offense of the criminal (who is given no opportunity to mount a defense before he is sentenced and executed) on his body repeatedly, more and more deeply into the skin and underlying tissues until the prisoner bleeds to death in agonizing slowness, after which his body is unceremoniously dumped into a pit. I can't say much more without spoiling the ending, but let's just say the conclusion, while shocking, is also somewhat satisfying.

The story at the heart of the collection is, of course, "The Metamorphosis", a strange but interesting tale about a man who awakens one morning from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a giant vermin (as the opening sentence famously informs us). The story follows his initial efforts to carry on living normally, the reactions of his family, and his decreasing humanity over time until his ultimate death, much to his family's relief. Bizarre, but nevertheless somewhat fascinating in a "WTF?" sort of way. Read it as a sort of existential thought-experiment, I guess.

"A Report to an Academy", probably my next favorite after "The Stoker", is a sort of reverse-"Metamorphosis"---it is narrated by an ape who describes how he came to behave like a human being, to the extent that he says he can no longer adequately describe his previous experience as an ape. While perhaps not exactly light-hearted, it is at least somewhat less dark and more humorous than most of the other stories.

The rest of the stories, such as "A Country Doctor", mostly seem to be descriptions of bizarre dreams, in which random things happen that don't make sense, and one event doesn't always seem to connect to the next in any way at all, as though the author expects us to be his Freudian psychoanalysts and see what we can make of it. Perhaps the best, and least nonsensical, of these is in fact called simply "A Dream", in which a man walking through a cemetery sees a name being engraved on a headstone, only to discover upon approaching that it is his own.

Now I don't think I am particularly dense, but to be perfectly honest I had a really hard time even following the rest. But then, even the translator, Joachim Neugroschel, reports that he had to go over the stories extra times in comparing his work to the originals because the material is so difficult and sometimes vague, so I guess I'm not alone. (The translator's preface is quite interesting in describing some of the more subtle aspects required in translating these stories including their linguistic history, though he does come off as a bit pretentious when he gets into some socio-political issues.)

So on the whole, there were two or three stories I quite liked, a couple that I couldn't say I really liked exactly but were nevertheless at least interesting, and quite a few that I didn't really care for at all (though most of these at least had the virtue of brevity). The collection is somewhat difficult for me to rate for that reason, so I'm giving it a neutral three stars---though perhaps it should get a bit more for the excellent translation and George Guidall's narration of this audio edition, so that if you're interested in these stories I would definitely recommend this as a good way to experience them. ( )