Transformer

The very first book I ever bought with my own money (no, not counting colossal, ponderous textbooks required in school) was Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I scrimped and saved just to buy that Bantam edition – a green paperback with a German Expressionist painting on the cover (Max Beckman’s jarring "Family Picture").

I bought it, stared at the cover for several minutes, found a quiet nook in our crumbling Usher-like house, and lost myself in the absurd universe of Gregor Samsa who one day wakes up as a gigantic bug:

"‘What happened to me?’" he thought. It was no dream."

It was my first encounter with what William S. Burroughs would call the interzone, where the ordinary meshes with the extraordinary, nightmarishly and surrealistically. I devoured the other Kafka books (The Trial, The Castle, a collection of his "parables" and maxims such as "A cage went in search of a bird…"), but The Metamorphosis became my sentimental favorite. (Others would soon follow: the Beats, Albert Camus, Fyodor Doestoevsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, David Bowie, Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Lou Reed, Thom Yorke and other unhappy campers. I ate less, read more, rented VHS tapes more, listened more, and despaired infinitely.)

Kafka presented the predicament of traveling salesman Gregor without fanfare, flourishes, or philosophizing. He told the story as if it were the most normal thing in the world: Gregor has gotten so preoccupied with providing for his family that he transforms into a vermin because he has become a sort of commodity to the family; he has alienated himself from his humanness, his true nature. The premise is so logical I started to believe we could all wake up one day transformed into something so far apart from who we really are. (One day, I did. But that’s another story.)

Adigression: Literary lore has it that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block, and what he did was read a Franz Kafka book that was translated into Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges. Synchronicity, indeed. That’s just like listening to a Lou Reed song covered by Iggy Pop and produced by David Bowie. Kafka, Borges and Marquez are three of the best writers of all time. Marquez wrote the magic-realistic soap opera (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the tale of love and sporadic diarrhea (Love in the Time of Cholera). Borges’ Labyrinths is a mesmerizing read, especially "The Circular Ruins," "The Garden of Forking Paths" and other tales of infinity, mirrors, alephs and secret miracles. And, of course, Kafka churned out texts that are ideal to read while listening to Radiohead’s "OK Computer."

The reader gets sucked into Gregor’s existential dilemma in The Metamorphosis. How does one deal with this wicked transformation, anyway? Gregor horrifies and disgusts his parents. His sister (whom he fervently adores) cannot help but be affected by the strange changes in the household. In the end, the insect dies and the sister undergoes her own "metamorphosis." Another person to be used by the exploitative parents, perhaps?

What’s great about classic literature is that at some point the stories end and we are left erecting elaborate futures for the characters (unless all the characters die in something apocalyptic, or unless you’re dealing with James Joyce’s cyclical Finnegan’s Wake where everything ends with the beginning.)

These musings were brought about by the recent purchase of Peter Kuper’s graphic novel version of Kafka’s novella.

I really dig Kuper’s version of the archetypal tale (parable? fable?). His scratchboard illustration style gives it a quirky, expressionistic twist. The text crawls. The dark panels lend the story a more sinister atmosphere. The irony is, this guy draws the Spy Vs. Spy strip for Mad. Usually, books as epochal as The Metamorphosis fail to make the, pardon the pun, "metamorphosis" to comic books, or even movies for that matter.

Nothing could replace finding an un-infested corner of one’s house to read Kafka’s text (never mind the fact that it’s a translation) and prepare for the mind to be blown, but it is still a thrill to reacquaint oneself with Gregor’s mishap in less than 30 minutes courtesy of Kuper. Especially during these turbulent times when our surroundings are turning into a Kafkaesque setting: everything has been rendered senseless and meaningless. And we feel like crushed bugs lying hysterical, useless and letdown on the ground every day (with school or work and pointless longing).

Hmmm, Franz Kafka was the Thom Yorke of his generation.