The Metamorphosis

In his notes on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a work he rated very highly, the Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov sketched the layout of the Samsa family’s apartment, which is the sort of thing you want to do after reading the story because Kafka is careful to describe the placement of the different doors leading out of Gregor’s bedroom and then the furnishings of the apartment.

I thought of this when I opened Peter Kuper’s adaptation, which begins with a full-page spread of Gregor’s bedroom and Gregor lying on his back, transformed into a giant bug. It’s very cluttered in that late-nineteenth century way, with the rug and the wallpaper and the dresser and the alarm clock and the case full of samples (Gregor is a traveling salesman for a textile concern), and that odd fetish picture that Gregor later mounts and that I was surprised Kuper didn’t make more out of. Shouldn’t the woman in the picture have been the troll-haired cleaning lady, who will later appear as Gregor’s dominatrix? In any event, we also identify the window and one of the doors, which will both play important roles. It’s a bit of domestic scene-setting that makes Samsabeetle (as David Cronenberg called him) almost disappear amidst all the bric-a-brac.

Kuper’s introduction notes the connection between Kafka’s nightmare and Winsor McCay’s (earlier) comic-strip “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” but I was feeling the more obvious inspiration here was Robert Crumb, who had himself done a comic biography of Kafka that included adaptations of Kafka’s works, including The Metamorphosis. Crumb certainly had a fellow feeling with the theme of the Untermensch and that’s picked up again here with the emotional radiation coming out of people’s heads and the use of perspective to make Gregor seem even more threatened and smaller (a scaling that we’re shown has begun even before his transformation). All of these things are related.

That said, this book is Kuper’s own thing and I think he did a great job capturing both the story’s realism and the way that reality is strained and distorted through an expressionistic lens. The depiction of the bug with a human head is representative of this pull in both directions, as is the typeface lettering. I think a lot of the classics I see illustrated are hit and miss (including Kuper’s own take on Heart of Darkness), but here everything works really well in an adaptation that manages to be both faithful to the source and something new.

Graphicalex