Leah's Reviews > Kafka

The mythos (and thousands of volumes of accompanying thought) surrounding Franz Kafka’s oeuvre can make him an intimidating and overwhelming author for the uninitiated. As a testament to the formative nature of his works (within the realm of modern literature), his surname has entered the contemporary lexicon – Kafkaesque - to denote byzantine bureaucracy. And yet -- despite the attention and consideration heaped upon The Trial, The Metamorphosis, etc. -- Kafka is ultimately an accessible writer. Though he delves into the fantastic, the concerns and difficulties in his stories are anything but unusual: he addresses common, even quotidian, anxieties about purpose and control.

I adored Robert Crumb’s Kafka: his distinct illustration style, vacillating between caricature and grotesque, is befitting the subject. The text author, David Mairowitz, is skilled at distilling complex themes into approachable subject matter: he and Crumb seamlessly move between biography and literary criticism throughout the graphic novel. Without much (or any) prior experience, the reader will glean a thoughtful overview of the cultural, historical, and intellectual underpinning guiding Kafka’s repertoire.

(Summaries and basic analyses of The Trial, The Metamorphosis, Amerika, The Castle, "In the Penal Colony," and "The Hunger Artist" are interspersed throughout -- a strong selection of his most famous works).

The two creators work well together, and their contributions are complementary. Crumb’s artistry is absolutely perfect for capturing Kafka’s pervasive neuroses and obsessions; the exaggerated details and features evoke the thematic anxiety in Kafka’s short stories and novels. The autobiographical elements of Kafka are, so far as my knowledge goes, accurate portrayals of his relationships and personal idiosyncrasies and behaviors – especially the contradictions of his internal self-perception (manifest in his letters, diaries, and writing) and his external daily life.