INTRODUCING KAFKA THE JESTER

I am writing to recommend R. Crumb's Kafka with art provided by Robert Crumb and a script provided by David Zane Mairowitz.

This book has also been published under the titles, Introducing Kafka, Kafka for Beginners, and simply Kafka.

Crumb, the granddaddy of the underground comics movement, brings Kafka's biography and work to life in a way I would not have thought possible.  If you ever wondered what Gregor Samsa looks like when he becomes a bug, this is your chance to find out!

Crumb also lends a hand in imagining scenes from The Penal Colony, The Trial, The Castle, and other Kafka works.

Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the accompanying text is its interest in uncovering the less serious side of Kafka's art.  The book jacket of my edition compares Kafka's literary tradition to great Yiddish storytelling; and this is what Mairowitz has to say about efforts to read Kafka as a philosopher in earnest, and to identify him with a specific current in 20th century thinking:

"No writer of our time, and probably none since Shakespeare, has been so widely over-interpreted and pigeon-holed.  Jean-Paul Sartre claimed him for Existentialism, Camus saw him as an Absurdist, his life-long friend and editor, Max Brod, convinced several generations of scholars that his parables were part of an elaborate quest for an unreachable God.

[Also] 'Kafkaesqe' has come to be associated with the faceless bureaucratic infrastructure...[of] the Western world....it is an adjective that takes on almost mythic proportions in our time, irrevocably tied to fantasies of doom and gloom, ignoring the intricate Jewish Joke that weaves itself through the bulk of Kafka's work." (my emphasis)

I'm not sure Mairowitz is right.  Kafka seems to me about as serious as one can be while remaining ambulatory, and (obviously) caught in the grip of a horrible vision.  But, let it be said:  Crumb's artistry makes it much easier to entertain Mairowitz otherwise implausible suggestion, and, right or wrong as an interpretation of Kafka's intentions, R. Crumb's Kafka opens up new dimenstions of our most neurotic 20th century literary artist.  You won't read Kafka with the same eyes again.