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Franz Kafka |
Metamorphosis |
(die Verwandlung) |
- Text of Franz Kafka's Metamorphisis:
English,
Original German
- Commentary,
by Vladimir Nabokov.
In perhaps the most striking part, Nabokov points out
that the creature Samsa becomes is not a cockroach but a beetle,
and moreover, that beetle should have wings:
"...he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)"
- Good Ol' Gregor Brown,
by R. Sikoryak. 2 pages, 1990.
(Comic parody , with "Peanuts" characters.)
- Kockroach,
by Tyler Knox. 368 pages, 2006. (A cockroach wakes up as a man.)
Review (NYT).
- Shoebag,
by Mary James. 135 pages, 1992.
(Grade 4-6 -- In a nifty twist on Kafka, a la Metamorphosis , this "popular young-adult author" asks readers to imagine the revulsion a cockroach might feel at having been suddenly transmuted into a boy.)
- Insect Dreams: The Half Life Of Gregor Samsa,
by Marc Estrin. 468 pages, 2005.
(The hapless antihero who morphed into a cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis is resurrected and given a rather busy second life. Sold to a Viennese sideshow rather than being swept into the trash, he quickly becomes the major attraction in a bizarre little circus.)
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