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Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka
'A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.' Marina Warner
In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka?
Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself.
Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.
In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka?
Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself.
Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.
- GenresNonfiction
255 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 2, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 5, 2024
I did not know that it has been exactly 100 years since Franz Kafka died.
This is a new book by a Polish born literary scholar seeking to explain the continued influence and. Importance of Kafka today - indeed if anything a growing popularity on a global scale . How does one do that, when the author died very young and with few of his works being published? This makes this an example of “reception” research. It is a short and readable book that is insightful and even clever. It has convinced me to go back to some of Kafka’s less well known short stories and to appreciate the influence of Kafka on so many other authors. The chapter on Kafka’s influence in Korea was especially interesting to me, due to the linkages with such recent novels as “The Vegetarian”. I read the 2015 novel but it made me think of Apollo and Daphne rather than Kafka but I am open to that.
I remain a rank novice at literary criticism and so will continue to process this for a while. It is well worth reading if one has any interest in Kafka.
This is a new book by a Polish born literary scholar seeking to explain the continued influence and. Importance of Kafka today - indeed if anything a growing popularity on a global scale . How does one do that, when the author died very young and with few of his works being published? This makes this an example of “reception” research. It is a short and readable book that is insightful and even clever. It has convinced me to go back to some of Kafka’s less well known short stories and to appreciate the influence of Kafka on so many other authors. The chapter on Kafka’s influence in Korea was especially interesting to me, due to the linkages with such recent novels as “The Vegetarian”. I read the 2015 novel but it made me think of Apollo and Daphne rather than Kafka but I am open to that.
I remain a rank novice at literary criticism and so will continue to process this for a while. It is well worth reading if one has any interest in Kafka.
June 20, 2024
An enjoyable blend of biography, literary criticism, literary influence, and travelogue. I downloaded the sample after seeing it recommended by the Amazon algorithm, enjoyed it, and so read all of it.
Kafka is so impossible to place geographically, linguistically, ethnically. Is he Czech? Austro-Hungarian? German writer? Jewish? He was all of these and none of these. To learn more about him Karolina Watroba travels around to all of these places and more--including Oxford where many of his papers are and Korea. We learn a little more about Kafka's person, writing and impact in each of these places. She has a deeper discussion of a few of his works (Metamorphosis, The Judgment, The Trial) and also some discussion of a lot of works influenced by Kafka.
Most of all Watroba's relatively light and enthusiastic and curious tone shows through from beginning to end, making the book particularly enjoyable.
Kafka is so impossible to place geographically, linguistically, ethnically. Is he Czech? Austro-Hungarian? German writer? Jewish? He was all of these and none of these. To learn more about him Karolina Watroba travels around to all of these places and more--including Oxford where many of his papers are and Korea. We learn a little more about Kafka's person, writing and impact in each of these places. She has a deeper discussion of a few of his works (Metamorphosis, The Judgment, The Trial) and also some discussion of a lot of works influenced by Kafka.
Most of all Watroba's relatively light and enthusiastic and curious tone shows through from beginning to end, making the book particularly enjoyable.
June 24, 2024
By turns travelogue and biographical analysis, Watroba's study is a hymn to this most enduring of modernist writers. His worldwide appeal turns out to be a gratifying thing.
June 7, 2024
We've come to the point in Kafka's legacy where the journey to find his influence is the point, not the writings that got us there.
In what should be a longish New Yorker or NYRB article celebrating one-hundred years of death, which the marketing team felt compelled to mention in back-to-back sentences introducing this text, Watroba provides a terse first-person memoir on her experiences visiting places that Kafka lived alongside surface-level readings of his writings. Her guiding question is: what made Kafka Kafka? Then she spends five geographical chapters and a coda avoiding an answer. Why? She argues that aesthetic analysis is fine, but it's more interesting to see how readers respond to his works. (No it isn't.)
One of her sub-arguments (as a value judgement not a categorical prefix) is that Kafka's culture and identity (Jewish?, Czech?, German?) should be de-valued while the identity of the reader of his texts should be valued. Is that not an obvious contradiction? But the chapters go on to do the worst of both worlds: lightly describing various Kafka readers in Europe and select parts of Asia as well as the bits of Kafka's bio that one can find on Wikipedia.
One aspect that could have been fleshed out for an engrossing perspective could have been a deeper historical and socio-cultural analysis of Kafka's manuscripts. Even though the Suez Crisis was referenced, Watroba doesn't go into how and why places like Switzerland and the declining British Empire became financial and literary preservation homes in the immediate postwar world, which is quite important and would have fit into the overall worldwide de-contextualizing Kafka as a human and writer thesis.
In short, this 'book' has a confused identity: in searching for Kafka through creating as much ambiguity as possible, Watroba likewise loses any concrete identity to what she's written.
In what should be a longish New Yorker or NYRB article celebrating one-hundred years of death, which the marketing team felt compelled to mention in back-to-back sentences introducing this text, Watroba provides a terse first-person memoir on her experiences visiting places that Kafka lived alongside surface-level readings of his writings. Her guiding question is: what made Kafka Kafka? Then she spends five geographical chapters and a coda avoiding an answer. Why? She argues that aesthetic analysis is fine, but it's more interesting to see how readers respond to his works. (No it isn't.)
One of her sub-arguments (as a value judgement not a categorical prefix) is that Kafka's culture and identity (Jewish?, Czech?, German?) should be de-valued while the identity of the reader of his texts should be valued. Is that not an obvious contradiction? But the chapters go on to do the worst of both worlds: lightly describing various Kafka readers in Europe and select parts of Asia as well as the bits of Kafka's bio that one can find on Wikipedia.
One aspect that could have been fleshed out for an engrossing perspective could have been a deeper historical and socio-cultural analysis of Kafka's manuscripts. Even though the Suez Crisis was referenced, Watroba doesn't go into how and why places like Switzerland and the declining British Empire became financial and literary preservation homes in the immediate postwar world, which is quite important and would have fit into the overall worldwide de-contextualizing Kafka as a human and writer thesis.
In short, this 'book' has a confused identity: in searching for Kafka through creating as much ambiguity as possible, Watroba likewise loses any concrete identity to what she's written.
June 5, 2024
This is an engaging, accessible and compelling study of, as Watroba puts it, 'how Kafka became Kafka'. It journeys from what textual scholarship can tell us to the popularity of Kafka in South Korea, stopping at many fascinating places en route. Watroba has a real gift for spotting the key detail of any aspect of the story and conveying it concisely and clearly. A pleasure to read and learn from. To take one example, her riveting account of Malcom Pasley's examination of the manuscript of Der Prozess (amongst other things Pasley was able to prove that Kafka wrote the beginning and end before anything else and explain why he disassembled the notebooks it was written in). But here, as in the rest of the book, Watroba isn't content to rest on a summary of the scholarship. She reflects intelligently on what it might mean for our own reading.
I listened to the audiobook. Deborah Baim's narration is adequate, no more than that, and is unfortunately littered with some bizarre mispronunciations. Audible do include as a PDF Watroba's invaluable endnotes.
I listened to the audiobook. Deborah Baim's narration is adequate, no more than that, and is unfortunately littered with some bizarre mispronunciations. Audible do include as a PDF Watroba's invaluable endnotes.
June 15, 2024
There are so many books on Kafka that it's hard to know what to read about him. This is an excellent book if you care about Kafka's reception. I learned a lot about the role he played in a variety of world literatures, especially Korean lit.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews