Customer Reviews

Give It Up! And Other Short Stories

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm familiar with Franz Kafka's novels and stories and I can say that they were great. Just as Peter Kuper added an amazing contextual, visual, and more humanly relatable touch to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" his work on Frank Kafka's short stories is just as great. The visual element doesn't denigrate, degrade, or cheapen the quality of the material, as one would generalize that adapting classic literature to graphic novel form would; instead it elevates it to the level of making the stories more relatable, presentable, and available to those who wouldn't normally pick up a novel, but just may get interested in doing so afterwards, similar to my response to history books after reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of American Empire" (the graphic novel adaptation of his history text "A People's History of the United States"; which I'm now sucked into.).

I give Peter Kuper's adapation to all of Franz Kafka's work - which lends itself to a wild imagination and visual frontier - 5 out of 5, 10 out of 10, and 100 out of 100.

I'm on a graphic novel kick and saw "Kafka" in the title. What's not to like? Just about everything.

I felt incredibly dumb reading this book. The stories are short parables about, um, something. I loved the stark BW graphics, but could make neither head nor tales from the stories. The first one ("A Little Fable")is about a mouse running in a maze (the corporate rat race, maybe?) who in the end faces a cheese-laden trap. A cat peering over the edge of the maze says, "You only need to change your direction." Then eats the mouse. This take place on 4 pages.

Other short takes involve a man-shaped bridge, A man asking directions from a cop, an insane murderer and a "hunger artist" living in a cage at the zoo.

OK, I'm a moron. I don't get it and don't care to try. The stories are either incredibly deep or incredibly pointless. If you're a Kafka fanatic, these illustrations of his work might appeal to you. For everyone else, give it up.