A Lottery I Wouldn't Want to Win

I am left feeling traumatised after reading Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery". I knew there was a reason that I wanted to read Shirley Jackson and that I also wanted to know as little about her work as possible before reading it. She terrifies the reader in this story and builds suspense in such a way that I read with a looming sense of dread and a tummy that was feeling decidedly uneasy and still is, for that matter.

The volume pictured isn't available until October and along with We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House is on my wishlist. "The Lottery" though is readily available online and is only five pages long; I urge you to read it but beware of losing your wits and perhaps your breakfast.

I cannot reveal much about the plot -nor do I want to- but suffice to say it is set in small-town America, concerns the yearly, ritualistic Lottery that occurs amongst the townspeople, and is a deeply unsettling exam of barbaric inhumanity. Upon publishing the short story in 1948 The New Yorker received a virulently negative response from its readers with hate mail and subsciption cancellation in abundance. To illicit such a strong response over a short story was unprecedented.

It is a long wait until October to read Jackson's other works.

"Metamorphosis"

Why have I not read any Kafka until now? Truth be told, I thought he was as literary high-brow and as inaccessible as Proust, Joyce, Dante (not to say that I won't read Proust, Joyce or Dante at some point as I want to but previous attempts have failed); I was, however, wrong.

From the famous opening line, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect", Franz Kafka's short story "Metamorphosis" is both accessible, intelligent and enjoyable. First published in 1915 this entomological tale is surprisingly modern and simultaneously timeless. Flippant and simple the short story is tragic from its wonderful opening line above to its cyclical conclusion, where Gregor's sister Grete has also metamorphosed in a young woman.

Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who financially supports his parents and younger sister, wakes from nightmares to find he has become the Samsa beetle (coined by Vladimir Nabokov) but retains his own thought processs, which is at casual odds with the phsyicality of the beetle. It is interesting to observe this thought process deterioriate; Gregor remains himself within the grotesque form and his bias does not allow him to understand and appreciate that he is not the same as he was to his family. His perception of his family's words and actions in their shocked, disgusted and mourning state is darkly humorous. Gregor sees them through his own mind's eye, he even closes his eye-lids but beetles have no eye-lids; his family see only the monstrous beetle. It's a very scientific approach: what we see is informed by our brain, not our eyes themselves.

If this is Kafkaesque then I had nothing to be scared of and I am excited to discover such great writing; I look forward to experience more (albeit limited) Kafka in the future.