There are no better words for it. The literary equivalent to the life of the elephant man. The tightrope Kafka walks is to tug both at our sympathy for humanity and the animalistic world. The story is about so many things -- sacrifice, fate, lust, pain, the meaning of life, the meaning of soul -- that to sum it up here is hard.There are certain sorts that will be put off by the subject matter of a big bug. Read past it. This is the portrait of failure, shame and despair beyond any other portrait. There is little that could ever be worse, than to be as sweet as you ever could be, as human as you ever were, and yet completely inhuman.