nolelia

I've never been a huge fan of Crumb's drawing, but someone gave me this book a year or two ago and I realized that the longer I didn't read it, the sillier I would feel. Half of it is a so-so Kafka biography, and the other half is pretty much a series of cliff's notes on some of the best-known stories and novels. In his defense, Crumb's style lends itself well to pictures of bulging eyes, nervous moles, confused foreheads beaded with sweat, etc, but these plot synopses still manage to feel like a series of cop-outs - as if Crumb and whoever did the words (David Mairowitz, amazon tells me...goodreads attributes the book solely to Crumb) realized halfway through that they couldn't illustrate nearly enough scenes from Kafka's life to make an entire book. The biography bits are interesting, of course, although they would've been considerably less so had I known anything at all about Kafka before I read this book. In the end, I don't really see very much awesome back-and-forth between the pictures and words here...it's the Kafka wikipedia entry illustrated by a guy whose illustrations are not to my taste. As far as the plot summaries, I mean no offense to David Mairowitz but he ain't no Kafka.

2023-07-09 14:50