Welcome to the seventeenth of our monthly audio adventures in Tales for Our Time. This latest radio serial, read by yours truly, is not inappropriate as we approach the season of Halloween - because sometimes you don't need to go out and get a scary costume; sometimes you just wake up one day and find you're wearing it:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
That's one of the most famous opening sentences in all of literature, and, as I say in my introduction to the first episode, it's a corker. That's what Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis is "about": a man who opens his eyes in bed to find he's now a giant beetle, or cockroach. But this isn't a creature feature, a monster story: Gregor isn't the wolfman. Which is one reason why Kafka was strongly resistant to publishers putting a "gigantic insect" on the cover of his book (top right). It's about metamorphosis in a broader sense: For it is not merely Gregor who is transformed, but his father, his mother and especially his sister - and the relationships between them.
Gregor isn't aware of all this on that first morning. He thinks waking up as a giant beetle is just a minor inconvenience that means he'll have to take the later train to work:
He meant actually to open the door, actually to show himself... He was eager to find out what the others, after all their insistence, would say at the sight of him. If they were horrified then the responsibility was no longer his and he could stay quiet. But if they took it calmly, then he had no reason either to be upset, and could really get to the station for the eight o'clock train if he hurried.
He is to discover that there's rather more to it than that. Metamorphosis is also the story of what happens when a functioning provider finds he no longer has any useful purpose, or a life of self-worth and dignity - and in that sense it is truly a Tale for Our Time. To hear me read Part One of Kafka's novella, prefaced by my own introduction to the story, please click here and log-in.
As I've emphasized since we launched The Mark Steyn Club last year, our regular content - all my daily commentary, cultural and geopolitical essays, our weekend movie and music features, SteynPosts and On the Town and all the rest - will always be free to everyone around the planet. In fact, every week we now offer more free content than at any point in our fifteen-year history. But we have spent the last seventeen months letting Club members in on a few experimental features which we might eventually make more widely available. Tales for Our Time is one such experiment: If you're not a Club member (or you are but you've never partaken of this series) you can hear what you're missing in our first-birthday Tales for Our Times sampler, a 75-minute audio special hosted by me and including excerpts from some of our ripping yarns of the last year - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, John Buchan, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson. And, if it whets your appetite, you can find the above authors and a half-dozen more collected here.
I'm truly thrilled to see that our nightly radio serials have proved one of the most popular of our Club extras this last year-and-a-third. I did do a little professional story-reading a zillion years ago, so, if these fancies tickle you, we may release them as audio books on CD or Audible a ways down the road. But for the moment it's an exclusive bonus for members. If you've enjoyed our monthly Steyn Club radio adventures and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, SteynPosts, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Priority booking for the second Mark Steyn Club Cruise (following this month's sell-out inaugural cruise);
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, including my upcoming tour with Dennis Miller;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to Metamorphosis but to all the other audio adventures listed below.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, whether you like my reading of this seventeenth Tale for Our Time or are minded to crush me like a bug, then feel free to comment away below. And do join us tomorrow for Part Two of Metamorphosis.
For previous Tales for Our Time, click below:
#1: The Tragedy of the Korosko
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#2: The Time Machine
by H G Wells
#3: The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
#4: The Prisoner of Zenda
by Anthony Hope
#5: The Cat That Walked By Himself
by Rudyard Kipling
#6: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#7: The Rubber Check
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#8: A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
#9: Plum Duff
by Mark Steyn
#10: To Build a Fire
by Jack London
#11: The Overcoat
by Nikolai Gogol
#12: The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
#13: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
#14: The Man Who Would Be King
by Rudyard Kipling
#15: His Last Bow
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#16: Greenmantle
by John Buchan
