Anxious Pleasures : A Novel After Kafka

"Sometimes I wonder, looking from one to the other, what family is for. You live in one all your life only to discover yourself in a room like this, and yet all you have in common with these people is the color of your eyes, the slant of your nose."

So Grete Samsa opines, even after her brother Gregor's unfortunate... change. Color of eyes, slant of nose? Once perhaps, but where has that inherited resemblance fled so suddenly?

Wait a minute-- Gregor? Samsa? THE Gregor Samsa?

That's right, we're back in the Samsa family apartment, vestibule to so much of modern literature, as Lance Olsen slyly revisits Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. This time around the focus is not on the... changeling, but on the rest of the baffled family, and their serving girl, and their cook, and the Chief Clerk-- Kafka's entire supporting cast, in fact-- as well as some freshly-minted actors, such as the writer downstairs and a present-day reader taking up Kafka's parable for the first time. In a subtle sleight of verbal alchemy, Olsen ventriloquizes his great predecessor while at the same time maintaining (and further refining) that sleek style of his own, ardently cherished by those who have been reading him for a quarter-century now. Anxious Pleasures is precisely that: a funny but chilly pleasure, and a finely crafted work of art. Here's the best to date from this as-yet insufficiently-appreciated contemporary master.

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.

Publisher: Counterpoint
Distributor: Perseus Distribution
Publication Date: 02-01-2007
Pages: 176
Measurements: 7.00in X 5.00in X 6.40oz