Out Of the Box

I'm currently reading the collection of best short stories written by Franz Kafka and I'm strangely struggling very hard to keep up with it. I won't try to deny it, I seriously don't get him or his strange innuendoes of human flaws and falsehood in living. I feel choked by the way he clearly describes something yet his direct intentions remain unclear. I hate it that I have to make my own sense of everything and give every single incident my own personal understanding. But I think it might be that I'm just not used to the genre and subconsciously, I do not want to suit myself to it.

Some of my friends might know that I have this weird fascination over Indian and Chinese writers, especially of those living/had lived in Western countries. I seem to think that I can borrow their cap for a while and try to configure my thoughts according to theirs because we have the solidarity of coming from an Eastern country with all its mores and moral but realistically, it's a modern cut-throat world where these traditions cannot seem to survive. These dilemmas are something I think I can identify with even if I was just living in Malaysia because it encapsulates the possible ways I'm threatened to drive my life.

But the thing is that, usually these Eastern-Western clash is a potrayal of a real world where these writers somehow try to tell you how to function and how to act. They provide you with implicitly hidden solutions to life and I think I've been groomed to function in what is real and tangible that I find it very hard to accept the lessons immaculately postulated by the Metamorphosis of Kafka's Gregor Samsa or the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice's Lestat.

I wished that I was more open-minded and I wished that I can somehow tell myself to stop refraining to read the stories until they're finished. I guess education is going to be a lifelong process for me indeed and I hope to see the day that I will stop despising people for not writing the way I want them to... :p