Writings by and about Kafka and textual notes accompany this translation of his early-twentieth-century work.
The Metamorphosis (in German, Die Verwandlung) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915, and arguably the most famous of his works along with the longer works The Trial and The Castle. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a giant "monstrous vermin" (see Lost in translation, below). It is widely regarded as a highly symbolic tale with various interpretations.
From Publishers Weekly
Kuper has adapted short works by Kafka into comics before, but here he tackles the most famous one of all: the jet-black comedy that ensues after the luckless Gregor Samsa turns into a gigantic bug. The story loses a bit in translation (and the typeset text looks awkward in the context of Kuper's distinctly handmade drawings). A lot of the humor in the original comes from the way Kafka plays the story's absurdities absolutely deadpan, and the visuals oversell the joke, especially since Kuper draws all the human characters as broad caricatures. Even so, he works up a suitably creepy frisson, mostly thanks to his drawing style. Executed on scratchboard, it's a jittery, woodcut-inspired mass of sharp angles that owes a debt to both Frans Masereel (a Belgian woodcut artist who worked around Kafka's time) and MAD magazine's Will Elder. The knotty walls and floors of the Samsas' house look like they're about to dissolve into dust. In the book's best moments, Kuper lets his unerring design sense and command of visual shorthand carry the story. The jagged forms on the huge insect's belly are mirrored by folds in business clothes; thinking about the debt his parents owe his employer, Gregor imagines his insectoid body turning into money slipping through an hourglass. Every thing and person in this Metamorphosis seems silhouetted and carved, an effect that meshes neatly with Kafka's sense of nightmarish unreality.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Gregor Samsa wakes up and discovers he has been changed into a giant cockroach. Thus begins "The Metamorphosis," and Kuper translates this story masterfully with his scratchboard illustrations. The text is more spare, but the visuals are so strongly rendered that little of the original is changed or omitted. Though the story remains set in Kafka's time, Kuper has added some present-day touches, such as fast-food restaurants, that do not detract from the tale. He has used the medium creatively, employing unusual perspectives and panel shapes, and text that even crawls on the walls and ceilings, as Gregor does. The roach has an insect body but human facial expressions. Once he is pelted with the apple, readers can watch his rapid decline, as his body becomes more wizened and his face more gaunt. This is a faithful rendition rather than an illustrated abridgment.
---Jamie Watson, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore
Book Dimension
Height (mm) 175Width (mm) 105
Customer Reviews
1.An Aspect of Life, May 24 2004
Reviewer: Brandon Jaehne (Gibsonia , PA USA)
In the book Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, the main character Gregor Samsa deals with the trouble of waking up to becoming a dung beatle. I believe that Kafka wrote metamorphosis on a different level then its rather elementary outershell.I believe that Gregor's struggle is an exaggerated form works with differences in people in the world and I believe that that's what Kafka was trying to accomplish in his writing of this sci fi book. Over decades and decades, people have been judged by the way the look or their creed or their color of their skin. I believe this book symbolizes the way people react to unique forms of characteristics of people.
I enjoyed this book because of Gregor's struggle with this change in his life even if it was a bit obtuse. As the story unravels you find out that in a fit of rage his father handicaps him, which is another weakness that he has to deal with. The story deals with coping with a handicap and is not the kind of "happy " stories that we have today. I believe that this book is a bit boring when it comes to its science fiction meanings but when you look at it as an abstract thought the book is well written and sends a great message. I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in taking a book on levels and not for the first level. If you are looking for a great science fiction book I would stay with a Bradbury book.
2.Great work, hard to swallow !, May 19 2004
Reviewer: Prasanna Karmarkar "peeker marker" (West Lafayette, IN United States)
Backdrop -
This was my first Kafka story. I only picked it up because (a) There's a lot of mystique surrounding the very sound "Kafka" (b) He's one of the few whose name has been immortalised as a word in the english lexicon ...i.e., "Kafkaesque". I read this story , and others, while on my daily commute to Manhattan.
Thoughts -
I am usually leery of the quality of translated works, and being Teutonically Disadvantaged, cannot compare it to the Deutsch original.
A very original creation - so original that it is thought of as a "novel" although its just a short story. Requires complete suspension of analysis and critical thinking. Requires the reader to possess blind faith in the pen of Kafka.
Kafka, the master of "non-disclosure, non-closure", starts the story on an outlandish note .. that of Gregor Samsa, the protagonist, waking up one day, having metamorphed into a LARGE insect of unclear description.
This discovery is met with different degrees of revulsion from his family, whilst he continues to have kind thoughts of them. He is kept sequestered and fed leftovers and rotting remains (something Gregor the Human would have abhorred, but Gregor the Insect loves).
Gregor's life is one steep descent from here on, and it proceeds within the laws of some unstated logic. The stages that the story goes through seem to flow quite naturally, which is weird because none of us can actually relate to such an experience. The story could be a parable - that Gregor has done something so heinous that he's now an "insect" in the eyes of the world. But nothing in the story actually supports this theory.
Conclusion -
No reasons or explanations are offered, no attempt at placating the readers' curiosity about this usual occurrence. "Incompletion is a quality of his work, a facet of his nobility" said John Updike of Kafka. In Updike's words, Kafka "abjures aesthetic finish and takes asceticism to the next level, where he is kept company by Pound and Salinger".
There's no relief whatsoever in the story - intellectual, moral or emotional. The story rushes headlong to its logical conclusion. At the end there is an obliquely optimistic note, but with Kafka you can never tell. For readers like myself, brought up on more "user-friendly" writers, this kind of writing is quite hard to get down. But its useful in an archeo-literary kind of way - that is, if you want to study the literary layer called avant-gardism.
Spotlight Reviews
1.Are we all Gregor Sassma? Maybe, Franz, maybe..., January 4, 2002
Reviewer: Jeffrey Ellis "author of It's Impossible To Start A Fire: If You Have No Desire To Burn" (Richardson, Texas United States)
For all the debate and argument over what this story means, the plot of the Metamorphosis is refreshingly simple. Gregor Sassma wakes up one morning and discovers that, over the course of the night, he's been transformed into a giant insect. The rest of this novella deals with Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new condition without providing a burden for his parents (who he has spent his life supporting and, it is made clear, veiw their son as little more than a commodity to be exploited) or for his sweet younger sister who Gregor views with an almost heart breaking affection. For his efforts to not bother society with his new insect identity, Gregor is both shunned and eventually destroyed by that same society, which of course now has little use for him. As dark as that plot outline may sound, what is often forgotten (or simply ignored) is that the Metamorphosis is -- in many ways -- a comic masterpiece. Instead of engaging in a lot of portentous philosophizing, Kafka tells his bizarre tell in the most deadpan of fashions. Ignoring the temptation to come up with any mystical or scientific explanations, Kafka simply shows us that Gregor has become an insect and explains how the rest of his short life is lived. This detached, amused tone makes the story's brutal conclusion all the more powerful.
As well, for all the theories on what Kafka's "saying" with this story, the reasons behind Gregor's transformation are not all that complicated or hard to figure out. Kafka, as opposed to too many other writers since, declines to spell out the specific reasons but still makes it clear that Gregor (and by extension, all the other Gregors in the world) had allowed himself to become a powerless insect long before actually physically turning into one. As someone who as selflessly sacrificed whatever independence he may have had to support his uncaring parents and their attempts to live an "upper class" life without actually having to suffer for it, Gregor has already willingly given up all the unique traits that make one a human. For me, even more disturbing than Gregor's fate, is Kafka's concluding suggestions that, now that Gregor has outlived his usefulness, his parents will now move on to his innocent sister. In short, despite the example of Gregor's own terrible fate, society will continue on its way with the majority of us giving up our own humanity to support the whims of a select few.
From the brilliant opening lines all the way to its hauntingly deadpan conclusion, The Metamorphosis is a powerful and satirical indictment of the bourgeois condition. Over the past few decades, the term Kafkaesque has been tossed around with a dangerous lack of discretion. It seems any writer who creates an absurd or dark trap for his main character ends up being labeled Kafkaesque. However, as this story especially makes clear, Franz Kafka was more than just an adjective. He was a unique and individual writer whose brilliance cannot be easily duplicated.
2.Great Story, But Do Not Buy This Book: Buy Kafkas's Collected Stories, April 23, 2006
Reviewer: J.E. Robinson (Toronto and New York)
This is a great story but very short, just 55 pages long. There is a cottage industry of sorts that has grown up trying to interpret the meaning of the story. I will skip that in my review and leave that to others.
First things first. The present book is ISBN 0553213695 and it was reissued in 2004 with the same ISBN number. If you look carefully at the "product details" listed above you will see a description for the old book published in 1972 with the same ISBN number. It has been replaced, and I received and read the newer version. It is a bit shorter than the original, just 195 versus 224 pages. It is translated by Stanley Corngold.
This is a famous and brilliant short story. For example, Nabokov selected this story as one of seven novels in his 1950s European literature course that he taught at Cornell (see Nabakov: "Lectures on Literature"). This is not a novel, but just a short story. He thinks that the aims of Kafka were relatively modest here and it is primarily an entertaining story and probably free of any Freudian interpretations. However, he does spend about 34 pages analyzing the story, the style, and the structure; he tries to explain what it means. Also, Nabokov thinks that some of the translator's words are not properly selected or are slightly confusing and those suggestions still apply to the current translation - as I checked this version against Nabokov's notes - and it is probably a better book in German.
As a general reader, I was disappointed with this particular version of the book. "The Metamorphosis" story itself is just 55 pages long and one in retrospect I thought that it was probably a bad buy for the avergae buyer. The rest of the 194 pages is given over to analysis and similar. If you want a better value, you should look at some of the collected works such as: "The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories" (Schocken Kafka Library), ISBN 0805210571, or "The Transformation (Metamorphosis) and Other Stories : Works Published During Kafka's Lifetime," 0140184783. Also, "The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka" ISBN: 0684800705.
In any case, this is a brilliant story and it will not disappoint the reader.
| ISBN | 553213695 |
|---|---|
| 出版社 | Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc |
| 尺寸 | 32开 |