Dominic H's Reviews > Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka

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.