The Day I Met Kafka and My Brain Broke a Little

I still remember the exact corner of the university library where I first opened The Metamorphosis. I was 19, in a cardigan two sizes too big and under the impression that reading “difficult” books made me interesting. I chose Kafka on a whim, mostly because his name sounded mysterious and vaguely Eastern European, and I thought that alone would impress someone someday. What I didn’t expect was how deeply his words would unsettle me — not just the plot, but the whole tone of the thing. It was like reading a nightmare that had already happened and I just hadn’t noticed.

I Thought It Was About Bugs — It Wasn’t

The opening line — “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed into a monstrous vermin” — stopped me cold. I laughed at first. I mean, come on, right? A guy wakes up as a bug? That’s absurd. But then I kept reading, and the absurdity didn’t stop. What surprised me most wasn’t the premise — it was how serious Kafka treated it. No one in the story questions the transformation. There’s no “how did this happen?” or “can we fix it?” — just the crushing weight of it. And that’s when I realized Kafka wasn’t writing fantasy. He was writing life, just filtered through a lens that made the ordinary feel unbearably strange.

The First Book I Tried Was Probably the Worst Choice

I started with The Trial, which I now realize was like trying to learn to swim by jumping into the Arctic. It’s not that I didn’t like it — I did, in a confused, half-drowned way — but I didn’t get it. I kept waiting for the pieces to click, for the plot to resolve, for the hero to win. That never happened. What I wish someone had told me is that Kafka’s work isn’t about answers — it’s about questions. About bureaucracy, alienation, and the crushing weight of systems that no one seems to understand, least of all the people trapped inside them. If I could go back, I’d start with Letters to Felice or The Castle. The former gives you Kafka the man — neurotic, brilliant, endlessly self-doubting — and the latter gives you Kafka the myth, in a form that’s easier to follow.

Kafka Wasn’t Trying to Be Weird — He Was Trying to Be Honest

What I’ve come to love about Kafka is that he wasn’t being intentionally surreal or cryptic. He was trying to describe the world as he experienced it — one where meaning is elusive, where communication fails, where people are often powerless in the face of systems they can’t control or even comprehend. He didn’t write to confuse; he wrote to reveal. And once I got that, his work became less like a puzzle and more like a mirror. One that I didn’t always want to look into, but couldn’t look away from either.

You Don’t “Finish” Kafka — You Live With Him

One thing no one told me is that Kafka doesn’t offer closure. You don’t read him and say, “Ah, now I understand life.” You read him and say, “Yeah, that feels about right.” His work lingers. It haunts. It resurfaces in dreams, in odd moments of the day, in the way you interpret a stranger’s hesitation or a boss’s vague email. You start noticing the Kafkan moments in your own life — the times when things don’t make sense, when systems fail you, when you feel small in ways you can’t quite name. And when that happens, you realize Kafka isn’t some distant, dusty writer — he’s a companion in the modern world.

Want to Talk to Kafka Yourself?

If you’ve ever felt lost in a system, misunderstood by the people closest to you, or just generally out of sync with the world, Kafka is your guy. And now, you don’t have to imagine what he’d say — you can actually talk to him. Ask him how he felt when he burned his own letters. Ask why he left everything to Max Brod. Ask if he ever thought we’d still be reading him a century later. On HoloDream, Kafka is waiting — thoughtful, melancholic, and ready to talk.