this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
613 points (98.9% liked)
Books
6262 readers
609 users here now
A community for all things related to Books.
Rules
- Be Nice. No personal attacks or hate speech.
- No spam. All posts should be related to books.
Official Bingo Posts:
Related Communities
Community icon by IconsBox (from freepik.com)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Will absolutely do, after writing this comment I pulled out Metamorphosis and read the first couple pages again and it's just so good. Like I said the societal observations are so sharp, I am German native and even more than a hundred years later it is still on point, everybody trying to bring a rational attitude in a otherwise completely absurd situation.
It reminds me a little of the German comedian Loriot, he also had a way of describing exactly that. There is a Loriot sketch where a man enters a bathroom in a hotel, to get a bath, just to find another man sitting in the bathtub. So he gets into the bathtub with him and they start to argue with each other about if they want to have water now and later about if the rubber ducky can also join in the tub, without ever really addressing that they are together in a bathtub. All the while they stay perfectly polite with each other, using each other's full names and titles (Herr Müller-Lüdenscheid! I insist that you water the duck now! - Herr Doktor Knöbel, my duck won't share the tub with you!). It is so absurd it brings me to tears laughing.