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Anxious Pleasures: A Novel after Kafka
Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight. All the familiar characters are here, including the hysterical mother, stern father, faithless sister, and the pragmatic household cook. But we are also introduced to, among others, the would-be author downstairs who daydreams of the narrative he may someday compose and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time.
Or do they all comprise a few of the disturbing dreams from which Gregor is about to snap awake one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin? In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but, too, a celebration, augmentation, complication, and devoted unwriting of a momentously influential text.
Or do they all comprise a few of the disturbing dreams from which Gregor is about to snap awake one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin? In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but, too, a celebration, augmentation, complication, and devoted unwriting of a momentously influential text.
- GenresFictionLiterature
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
About the author
Lance Olsen
49 books110 followersLance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.
Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.
Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
February 15, 2016
This slim novel is a deconstruction and a reconstruction of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, as well as a re-creation: history is changed and the so-called "natural disasters" are not natural.
The central premise in its reconstruction is one that hadn't occurred to me before and I ask myself: Why not? Despite one comment by one woman, it now seems obvious (though a bit deflating).
I wonder, too, why other things have been changed in reference to the original text. Though we are specifically told Margaret's reading The Metamorphosis, is she actually reading something slightly different? (Well, so are we.) Though we seem to be grounded in present-day London with her, is she in a different 'reality' a la Elizabeth Costello (a Coetzee novel referenced in an essay at the back of Margaret's book)? In one chapter of the recreated reconstruction, a character tells another to call him Ulrich: is 'Ulrich' in fact Gregor? Why is Gregor called Uwe in Margaret's text? Who is dreaming whom as memories are erased?
If we know Kafka's text, we are as unsettled as we were the first time we read The Metamorphosis. This is a not a novel of answers.
The central premise in its reconstruction is one that hadn't occurred to me before and I ask myself: Why not? Despite one comment by one woman, it now seems obvious (though a bit deflating).
I wonder, too, why other things have been changed in reference to the original text. Though we are specifically told Margaret's reading The Metamorphosis, is she actually reading something slightly different? (Well, so are we.) Though we seem to be grounded in present-day London with her, is she in a different 'reality' a la Elizabeth Costello (a Coetzee novel referenced in an essay at the back of Margaret's book)? In one chapter of the recreated reconstruction, a character tells another to call him Ulrich: is 'Ulrich' in fact Gregor? Why is Gregor called Uwe in Margaret's text? Who is dreaming whom as memories are erased?
If we know Kafka's text, we are as unsettled as we were the first time we read The Metamorphosis. This is a not a novel of answers.
May 9, 2020
"Fuck l’Art Pour l’Art"
This is the least rewarding of the four Lance Olsen novels that I've read so far. In fact, it highlights the self-indulgent premise of much literature that passes itself off as experimental or innovative post-modern fiction.
It’s ironic, because the novel is an extrapolation or fleshing out of Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis". It adds description, characters, thought processes, events, plot...but subtracts what is most distinctive about the original, especially the first sentence - the metamorphosis, the transformation, the change, the realisation that it has occurred, the shock of recognition.
This is perhaps like re-writing “Moby Dick" without the great white whale, or something that it symbolises. Readers have to ask themselves whether this so-called innovation was unnecessary or pointless. What does it achieve? In Lance Olsen's “Nietzche's Kisses", he has the character Richard Wagner say, “Fuck l’art pour l’art.” Maybe, here, the innovation is supposed to be justified by the slogan “art for art’s sake”. In other words, the work of art doesn't have to be necessary, or functional, nor does it have to have a point.
After Kafka
The novel's subtitle declares that it is “a novel after Kafka". What does the word “after" mean? Does it only mean that it was written temporally after Kafka's original, or does it mean that it was written in the style of, or as an homage to, “The Metamorphosis"? The first interpretation reveals what is least challenging and interesting about post-modernism – that it simply comes after modernism in time, and therefore responds chronologically to it.
So, what does “Anxious Pleasures" do or achieve? First, it situates a narrative in the apartment in which the Samsa family lived. However, Gregor hasn't been transformed into an insect (or a human mind inside the body of an insect). Instead, Gregor is recognisable as a human being, even if he is unkempt, psychotic and unsociable. His parents keep him hidden in his room, where nobody outside the family gets to see him (including newly invented characters and narrators, such as a servant girl, a butcher boy and a charwoman, who access the apartment or the building).
Second, his sister, Grete, has a brief relationship with a former soldier called Herrmann. Third, an unnamed writer (possibly Kafka himself, although he seems to be contemporary) lives in the apartment beneath the Samsas and dreams of writing his first novel, but gets tuberculosis.
His dream about two dying grandparents, Neddie and Nellie, forms the last chapter. It contains the most lyrical writing in the novel (not that there's much elsewhere), but seems to be tacked on for no apparent reason.
Lastly, Olsen introduces a contemporary character, Margaret, a resident of London, who seems to be reading a version of Kafka's novel as part of a book club. This version of the novel contains some post-modern essays that critique Kafka's novel from a perspective that sounds like Fredric Jameson. One of the essays refers to J. M. Coetzee's novel, “Elizabeth Costello", and its discussion of Kafka's story about the ape turned human, Red Peter.
Multiple Perspectives Without Insight
These strategies allow Olsen to introduce multiple perspectives (as he did in “Nietzche’s Kisses"), even if some of them are limited in what they're able to observe. (It's worth noting at this stage that Kafka's story is written in the third person omniscient style with particular emphasis on the point of view of Gregor. However, his point of view is missing from Olsen's novel.)
"Appropriating, Erasing and Engaging With the Lacunae"
In an interview with Derek Alger, Lance Olsen explains that the novel “appropriates and rethinks from the family’s and others’ points of view Kafka’s profoundly haunting, sadly comic novella...I wanted to engage with the lacunae in The Metamorphosis,...while simultaneously composing against them.”
He continues:
Uneasy Juxtapositions
This might have been Lance Olsen's intention. However, it's questionable whether he succeeded in anything but juxtaposing his own writing with (or against) a consummate modernist work, to the detriment of his own work. It’s much ado about nothing. Fortunately, its saving grace is that it is both brief and accessible.
SOUNDTRACK:
This is the least rewarding of the four Lance Olsen novels that I've read so far. In fact, it highlights the self-indulgent premise of much literature that passes itself off as experimental or innovative post-modern fiction.
It’s ironic, because the novel is an extrapolation or fleshing out of Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis". It adds description, characters, thought processes, events, plot...but subtracts what is most distinctive about the original, especially the first sentence - the metamorphosis, the transformation, the change, the realisation that it has occurred, the shock of recognition.
This is perhaps like re-writing “Moby Dick" without the great white whale, or something that it symbolises. Readers have to ask themselves whether this so-called innovation was unnecessary or pointless. What does it achieve? In Lance Olsen's “Nietzche's Kisses", he has the character Richard Wagner say, “Fuck l’art pour l’art.” Maybe, here, the innovation is supposed to be justified by the slogan “art for art’s sake”. In other words, the work of art doesn't have to be necessary, or functional, nor does it have to have a point.
After Kafka
The novel's subtitle declares that it is “a novel after Kafka". What does the word “after" mean? Does it only mean that it was written temporally after Kafka's original, or does it mean that it was written in the style of, or as an homage to, “The Metamorphosis"? The first interpretation reveals what is least challenging and interesting about post-modernism – that it simply comes after modernism in time, and therefore responds chronologically to it.
So, what does “Anxious Pleasures" do or achieve? First, it situates a narrative in the apartment in which the Samsa family lived. However, Gregor hasn't been transformed into an insect (or a human mind inside the body of an insect). Instead, Gregor is recognisable as a human being, even if he is unkempt, psychotic and unsociable. His parents keep him hidden in his room, where nobody outside the family gets to see him (including newly invented characters and narrators, such as a servant girl, a butcher boy and a charwoman, who access the apartment or the building).
Second, his sister, Grete, has a brief relationship with a former soldier called Herrmann. Third, an unnamed writer (possibly Kafka himself, although he seems to be contemporary) lives in the apartment beneath the Samsas and dreams of writing his first novel, but gets tuberculosis.
His dream about two dying grandparents, Neddie and Nellie, forms the last chapter. It contains the most lyrical writing in the novel (not that there's much elsewhere), but seems to be tacked on for no apparent reason.
Lastly, Olsen introduces a contemporary character, Margaret, a resident of London, who seems to be reading a version of Kafka's novel as part of a book club. This version of the novel contains some post-modern essays that critique Kafka's novel from a perspective that sounds like Fredric Jameson. One of the essays refers to J. M. Coetzee's novel, “Elizabeth Costello", and its discussion of Kafka's story about the ape turned human, Red Peter.
Multiple Perspectives Without Insight
These strategies allow Olsen to introduce multiple perspectives (as he did in “Nietzche’s Kisses"), even if some of them are limited in what they're able to observe. (It's worth noting at this stage that Kafka's story is written in the third person omniscient style with particular emphasis on the point of view of Gregor. However, his point of view is missing from Olsen's novel.)
"Appropriating, Erasing and Engaging With the Lacunae"
In an interview with Derek Alger, Lance Olsen explains that the novel “appropriates and rethinks from the family’s and others’ points of view Kafka’s profoundly haunting, sadly comic novella...I wanted to engage with the lacunae in The Metamorphosis,...while simultaneously composing against them.”
He continues:
“Anxious Pleasures thereby becomes, I hope, not simply a collaboration, but also a celebration, a complication, an exploration, an evaluation, an education, an interrogation, an augmentation, an elaborate and devoted erasure, and, ultimately, a kind of remembering that is also a kind of forgetting that parallels and appraises the Samsa family’s own slow forgetting of their beetle-backed son...”
Uneasy Juxtapositions
This might have been Lance Olsen's intention. However, it's questionable whether he succeeded in anything but juxtaposing his own writing with (or against) a consummate modernist work, to the detriment of his own work. It’s much ado about nothing. Fortunately, its saving grace is that it is both brief and accessible.
SOUNDTRACK:
November 19, 2023
I really enjoyed this unusual retelling of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It’s told from the point of view of all the surrounding characters not Gregor, including his parents and sister and the servants. There’s also a current character reading the book for a book club. Short chapters, different perspectives and styles, it also adds an older brother who was The Hunger Artist.
June 11, 2015
A reread. One of my favorite little-known novels, a retelling of Kafka's The Metamorphosis through the points of view of the other family members and the servants.
My 3d reading of this little novel in 9 years. As much as I admire Olsen's interpretation of the Samsa story and his imaginative sketching of the characters surrounding Gregor, I think it'll be quite some time before a 4th reading will stand up. I do recommend it for those interested in Kafka.
My 3d reading of this little novel in 9 years. As much as I admire Olsen's interpretation of the Samsa story and his imaginative sketching of the characters surrounding Gregor, I think it'll be quite some time before a 4th reading will stand up. I do recommend it for those interested in Kafka.
June 28, 2014
This is a beautifully written, lyrical and captivating book. Some of the prose is truly poetic, and masterfully written. I highly recommend this work of anything who appreciates Kafka and most particularity his story "The Metamorphosis."
To me this book reads more like an exploration into Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" rather than just a rewriting of the story. But I feel as if within the pages of his novel the author is seeking to discover a deeper meaning of the story. One of the interesting things about the book is the fact that while "The Metamorphosis" is told from Gregor's point of view, Olsen tells the story from the point of view of those around Gregor, his family, servants, tenants etc..
One thing I really liked was the way in which I felt Olsen humanizes these characters while still staying true to the original story. In "The Metamorphosis" Gregor's family do not come off as very sympathetic in their treatment of Gregor. Olsen doesn't make the characters come of as nicer, but he does give us an understanding of why they behave the way they do, he allows us to see their thoughts, and feelings in how they react to the situation.
The one thing that I did have a hard time with was understanding Olsen's vision of what Gregor looked like after his transformation. Within the book he only offers brief, vague descriptions of Gregor, but in those depictions Gregor seems to still have various different human attributes. It felt to me as if Olsen did not view the metamorphosis as a literal transformation, but rather it seemed to me that instead of in truth becoming an actual insect Gregor simply just went mad one day. The only way we know something is different about him is the way others react to him. But in reading Olsen's book instead of picturing a giant bug when Gregor is mentioned, I picture a man scampering about on all fours.
Perhaps in a way this is done to reiterate Gregor's humanity in spite of the change he has undergone. But a curious thought, in "The Metamorphosis" It seems that while Gregor has externally changed, internally he is still the same. But In Olsen's book it seems like externally he is the same, but internally he has altered.
Another interesting thought, is that while "The Metamorphosis" emphasis the way in which Gregor becomes exiled, Olsen's book displays the way each of the members of the family are exiled in different ways.
Also I do have to say that the very last chapter I did find somewhat confusing and rather random, and did not entirely understand what Olsen was trying to say with that.
To me this book reads more like an exploration into Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" rather than just a rewriting of the story. But I feel as if within the pages of his novel the author is seeking to discover a deeper meaning of the story. One of the interesting things about the book is the fact that while "The Metamorphosis" is told from Gregor's point of view, Olsen tells the story from the point of view of those around Gregor, his family, servants, tenants etc..
One thing I really liked was the way in which I felt Olsen humanizes these characters while still staying true to the original story. In "The Metamorphosis" Gregor's family do not come off as very sympathetic in their treatment of Gregor. Olsen doesn't make the characters come of as nicer, but he does give us an understanding of why they behave the way they do, he allows us to see their thoughts, and feelings in how they react to the situation.
The one thing that I did have a hard time with was understanding Olsen's vision of what Gregor looked like after his transformation. Within the book he only offers brief, vague descriptions of Gregor, but in those depictions Gregor seems to still have various different human attributes. It felt to me as if Olsen did not view the metamorphosis as a literal transformation, but rather it seemed to me that instead of in truth becoming an actual insect Gregor simply just went mad one day. The only way we know something is different about him is the way others react to him. But in reading Olsen's book instead of picturing a giant bug when Gregor is mentioned, I picture a man scampering about on all fours.
Perhaps in a way this is done to reiterate Gregor's humanity in spite of the change he has undergone. But a curious thought, in "The Metamorphosis" It seems that while Gregor has externally changed, internally he is still the same. But In Olsen's book it seems like externally he is the same, but internally he has altered.
Another interesting thought, is that while "The Metamorphosis" emphasis the way in which Gregor becomes exiled, Olsen's book displays the way each of the members of the family are exiled in different ways.
Also I do have to say that the very last chapter I did find somewhat confusing and rather random, and did not entirely understand what Olsen was trying to say with that.
May 28, 2008
Check out my book review in RCF (Vol. XXVIII, #1):
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/...
Here is the review in full:
The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka, by Lance Olsen
reviewed by Renée E. D’Aoust
Lance Olsen’s "anxious pleasures: a novel after kafka" is a surreal text of haunting, interlacing narratives. Olsen engages in direct conversation with the ghost of Kafka and with every character in his own and in Kafka’s book; in addition, Olsen adds contemporary Margaret, who is reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis for the first time. Margaret’s studies allow Olsen to include literary criticism of The Metamorphosis, but it isn’t a sleight-of-hand inclusion. Olsen suggests that as readers we are as much creators as critics, and Margaret shows the psychic struggles of such engagement with literature; for that reason, reading Olsen becomes a quest—not because it is difficult or veiled, but because in Olsen’s world, the reader becomes as important an imaginative tool as the text. Olsen is particularly skilled at creating a burlesque grotesque, yet still lyrical fiction, possible to interpret on so many levels one becomes giddy, as if riding a roller coaster through an ever-changing freak show. We all remember Kafka’s opening line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” In anxious pleasures, we don’t directly read Gregor Samsa’s voice, but we surely hear its raspy echoes, recognizing it most firmly through Gregor’s sister Grete. In one of Grete’s sections, she muses, “Growing up is a process of losing things.” Perhaps the novel hits us most the places where we ourselves have lost. Yet Gregor Samsa’s family tries to impose normality onto the grotesque, ridiculously clinging to familiarity: “We linger, clasping each other around the waist, admiring, taking pleasure in this string of breaths. A family.” Kafka made a place for the illogical tale that defies classification. In anxious pleasures, a graceful, haunting work, Lance Olsen reminds us that defying classification has lasting, imaginative value.
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/...
Here is the review in full:
The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka, by Lance Olsen
reviewed by Renée E. D’Aoust
Lance Olsen’s "anxious pleasures: a novel after kafka" is a surreal text of haunting, interlacing narratives. Olsen engages in direct conversation with the ghost of Kafka and with every character in his own and in Kafka’s book; in addition, Olsen adds contemporary Margaret, who is reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis for the first time. Margaret’s studies allow Olsen to include literary criticism of The Metamorphosis, but it isn’t a sleight-of-hand inclusion. Olsen suggests that as readers we are as much creators as critics, and Margaret shows the psychic struggles of such engagement with literature; for that reason, reading Olsen becomes a quest—not because it is difficult or veiled, but because in Olsen’s world, the reader becomes as important an imaginative tool as the text. Olsen is particularly skilled at creating a burlesque grotesque, yet still lyrical fiction, possible to interpret on so many levels one becomes giddy, as if riding a roller coaster through an ever-changing freak show. We all remember Kafka’s opening line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” In anxious pleasures, we don’t directly read Gregor Samsa’s voice, but we surely hear its raspy echoes, recognizing it most firmly through Gregor’s sister Grete. In one of Grete’s sections, she muses, “Growing up is a process of losing things.” Perhaps the novel hits us most the places where we ourselves have lost. Yet Gregor Samsa’s family tries to impose normality onto the grotesque, ridiculously clinging to familiarity: “We linger, clasping each other around the waist, admiring, taking pleasure in this string of breaths. A family.” Kafka made a place for the illogical tale that defies classification. In anxious pleasures, a graceful, haunting work, Lance Olsen reminds us that defying classification has lasting, imaginative value.
August 25, 2011
Listen to this: "Shutting my eyes, I slant into the presence of his arm, the pinprick flakes of cold tapping my face and vanishing, and begin to image myself suspended in the centre of a gigantic piece of marzipan. It is white and soft and grainy with almond paste and sugar. Behind the immediate scents lingers an understated vanilla that makes me forget all the French verbs I have been trying to learn." Also: "To forget about writing, the author who lives alone in the flat directly below the Samsas sometimes visualises himself as a piece of furniture." It's a rather strange book at times, but lovely, too, and I appreciated how different each character's writing style was, and how surprisingly non-Gregor-centric. This author presented the story very differently from the original, and though I was slightly disappointed by certain aspects of it ( ), it was an intriguing take on Gregor's condition, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who likes Kafka or who just wants to read something beautiful.
July 29, 2007
A bit like "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" meets Gregor Samsa, but without the comedy (naturally, it's Kafka). The story of Gregor Samsa's "Metamorphosis" through the eyes of his parents, sister, boss, the family servents, boarders and even a contemporary reader. Interesting and thought provoking to get a new picture of poor Gregor. The invention of his hunger artist brother Georg, the bombing of Prague and descriptions of a naked, dirty, insane Gregor reveal much about Olsen's interpretation of the classic text. The shift in voice and person between each chapter lends credence to each character's description of the situation, but I was especially interested in Grete whose sympathy for her brother changes so dramatically in the original text. Dry at times and the liberties with what's going on *outside* of the Samsa apartment left me a bit disappointed.
January 27, 2008
i might've given this 3 stars if i'd read kafka's metamorphosis. i didn't read the back flap very carefully before i borrowed it at the library, and i suspect there's a good chance i'd have enjoyed this book more, with metamorphosis as a context.
however, it'd still only get 3 stars because the writing is rather flat. periodically there are bursts of color in the prose (thank god), but in general, a lot of basic description without much feeling. the nature of what's truly happening is sometimes difficult to make out. true, that kept me more engaged, but it was also annoying.
also i am sure that, were the book not parceled out in character-by-character chapters, each with their own vantage point and dialect, i would have been truly bored. this unusual format kept me intrigued like nothing else did, and for that alone i would recommend it to any writer.
however, it'd still only get 3 stars because the writing is rather flat. periodically there are bursts of color in the prose (thank god), but in general, a lot of basic description without much feeling. the nature of what's truly happening is sometimes difficult to make out. true, that kept me more engaged, but it was also annoying.
also i am sure that, were the book not parceled out in character-by-character chapters, each with their own vantage point and dialect, i would have been truly bored. this unusual format kept me intrigued like nothing else did, and for that alone i would recommend it to any writer.
May 24, 2008
I ranked this with four stars at first but when I read it over and taught it, I appreciated its layers, its sophistication more than on the first read. The prose is lovely, and its stories are beautiful. I teared up at the end when the minor-est of minor characters appear for their part of the story.
April 4, 2008
retelling/ "unwriting" (?) of the metamorphosis. in class we decided it was more a reading of kafka the idea than any of his stories, though the metamorphosis is obvs the strongest force here. dunno. very well written, some dazzling tricks, but ultimately not particularly affecting.
December 16, 2008
A retelling of Kafka's Metamorphosis from the point of view of the other characters. Olsen's novel attempts to universalize Gregor's experience, ironically demonstrating that anomie and alienation are the two experiences that everyone shares.
May 11, 2009
I had some pretty high hopes for what I wanted this book to be. It was readable don't get me wrong and the idea is fantastic. I think maybe I just treasure the original story so much and have certain ideas of it's meaning in my mind that this story didn't play well with that.
October 3, 2007
this book explores Gregor Samsa's famous melt-down from the vantage points of those who surround him.
its lovely.
its lovely.
March 18, 2008
Olsen tells the story of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" from the points of view of everyhone surrounding poor Gregor, his family, friends, neighbors. As always, Olsen's style is impeccable.
September 17, 2024
I've been very much enjoying reading Olsen's novels. This one takes Kafka's Metamorphosis and retells it from the point of view of his family. There are some slight changes to the story to make their behaviour towards Gregor more understandable.
Olsen has also added a couple of extra elements, to whit a downstairs neighbour who's a consumptive author (guess who?) plus a woman in 21st century London who's studying the story which means Olsen can add some literary theory into the mix also.
I'm not 100% convinced that all these elements meld perfectly but I still think the book was an interesting read
Olsen has also added a couple of extra elements, to whit a downstairs neighbour who's a consumptive author (guess who?) plus a woman in 21st century London who's studying the story which means Olsen can add some literary theory into the mix also.
I'm not 100% convinced that all these elements meld perfectly but I still think the book was an interesting read
April 14, 2023
CN: sexual assault, ableism and extreme neglect, anti-Semitic remarks
September 17, 2015
I am not quite a fan of kafka, because he takes such a load to read, still, Olsen builds a baroque text that espouses a core of a family drama, that breaks itself apart into different narratives. I suppose each voice should be an "anxious pleasure" and that seems too inbred as most of the voices are of the love and exploration of young girls in a familial setting. Yet perhaps this is only the nest that Olsen is able to best hang together, as each story fragment bespeaks of a forgotten whisper of Kafka. Kafka's interior pose, for Olsen, becomes the expressed structure, not the literal plot, but half-thought, interluded feelings of anxious rhapsody that meditate on themselves and release to intersect and push each other as an aggregate onwards. Each tendril expresses together as one plot hinged on half spoken feelings, although of course, there is the understood learning, the reading of text by Margaret, another kind of interior monologue of Kafka as so many theorists like to draw out of him, through their wild filters and their linguistic tropes that structure their immanent truths. Of course this one text read by a girl would center on one who reads this text, enchanted by new narratives and theological theories that would read on each other as much as their metaphors read on one another truths the kind that theory likes kafka for speaking about.
They come together as Kafka's metamorphosis, a sacrifice of all the hard working boys for the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl, as their parents bask in her sunshine. So shall Olsen parrot this gesture as a tribute to kafka, and as an opportunity to weave new feelings from us, from the edges of our awareness, with the right inspecificity (he speaks of almost no names) and therefore the right specifcity. Truly a marvel, a working about nothing, saying nothing and therefore being about everything and saying it all.
They come together as Kafka's metamorphosis, a sacrifice of all the hard working boys for the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl, as their parents bask in her sunshine. So shall Olsen parrot this gesture as a tribute to kafka, and as an opportunity to weave new feelings from us, from the edges of our awareness, with the right inspecificity (he speaks of almost no names) and therefore the right specifcity. Truly a marvel, a working about nothing, saying nothing and therefore being about everything and saying it all.
February 17, 2014
This book would've gotten 5 stars if not for the modern day chapters strewn throughout. This is a retelling of 'The Metamorphosis' through the eyes of the surrounding characters - such a brilliant concept. It feels good to get an explanation, even if you have no idea whether it's the right one. Reacquaint yourself with Kafka's story before reading this.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews