Anxious Pleasures: A Novel after Kafka (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781593761356)

Anxious Pleasures takes Franz Kafka's profoundly haunting and sad comic novella, The Metamorphosis, and reanimates it through the vantage points of those who surrounded Gregor Samsa during his plight. All the familiar characters are here, including the hysterical mother, stern father, faithless sister, and the pragmatic household cook. But we are also introduced to, among others, the would-be author downstairs who daydreams of the narrative he may someday compose and a young woman in contemporary London reading Kafka's slim book for the first time.

Or do they all comprise a few of the disturbing dreams from which Gregor is about to snap awake one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin? In the tradition of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and John Gardner's Grendel, Olsen's novel not only represents a collaboration with a ghost, but, too, a celebration, augmentation, complication, and devoted unwriting of a momentously influential text.

Author: Lance Olsen
ISBN-10: 159376135X
ISBN-13: 9781593761356
Publisher: Catapult
Language: English
Published: 02/01/2007
Pages: 192
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.41lbs
Size: 6.98h x 5.01w x 0.53d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/29/2007 pg. 43
Library Journal 02/01/2007 pg. 64
Booklist 03/15/2007 pg. 26