Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka

by Karolina Watroba

'A high-spirited, richly informed, and original portrait, a cross between biography, literary analysis and a study in modern Karolina Watroba is an inspired guide and her book a pleasure to read.' Marina Warner

In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka?

Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are in part homages to the great man himself.

Metamorphoses is a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, drawing together literary scholarship with the responses of his readers through time. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Audiobook

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 2, 2024

Reviews

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable blend of biography, literary criticism, literary influence, and travelogue. I downloaded the sample after seeing it recommended by the Amazon algorithm, enjoyed it, and so read all of it.

Kafka is so impossible to place geographically, linguistically, ethnically. Is he Czech? Austro-Hungarian? German writer? Jewish? He was all of these and none of these. To learn more about him Karolina Watroba travels around to all of these places and more--including Oxford where many of his papers are and Korea. We learn a little more about Kafka's person, writing and impact in each of these places. She has a deeper discussion of a few of his works (Metamorphosis, The Judgment, The Trial) and also some discussion of a lot of works influenced by Kafka.

Most of all Watroba's relatively light and enthusiastic and curious tone shows through from beginning to end, making the book particularly enjoyable.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not know that it has been exactly 100 years since Franz Kafka died.

This is a new book by a Polish born literary scholar seeking to explain the continued influence and. Importance of Kafka today - indeed if anything a growing popularity on a global scale . How does one do that, when the author died very young and with few of his works being published? This makes this an example of “reception” research. It is a short and readable book that is insightful and even clever. It has convinced me to go back to some of Kafka’s less well known short stories and to appreciate the influence of Kafka on so many other authors. The chapter on Kafka’s influence in Korea was especially interesting to me, due to the linkages with such recent novels as “The Vegetarian”. I read the 2015 novel but it made me think of Apollo and Daphne rather than Kafka but I am open to that.

I remain a rank novice at literary criticism and so will continue to process this for a while. It is well worth reading if one has any interest in Kafka.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

We've come to the point in Kafka's legacy where the journey to find his influence is the point, not the writings that got us there.

In what should be a longish New Yorker or NYRB article celebrating one-hundred years of death, which the marketing team felt compelled to mention in back-to-back sentences introducing this text, Watroba provides a terse first-person memoir on her experiences visiting places that Kafka lived alongside surface-level readings of his writings. Her guiding question is: what made Kafka Kafka? Then she spends five geographical chapters and a coda avoiding an answer. Why? She argues that aesthetic analysis is fine, but it's more interesting to see how readers respond to his works. (No it isn't.)

One of her sub-arguments (as a value judgement not a categorical prefix) is that Kafka's culture and identity (Jewish?, Czech?, German?) should be de-valued while the identity of the reader of his texts should be valued. Is that not an obvious contradiction? But the chapters go on to do the worst of both worlds: lightly describing various Kafka readers in Europe and select parts of Asia as well as the bits of Kafka's bio that one can find on Wikipedia.

One aspect that could have been fleshed out for an engrossing perspective could have been a deeper historical and socio-cultural analysis of Kafka's manuscripts. Even though the Suez Crisis was referenced, Watroba doesn't go into how and why places like Switzerland and the declining British Empire became financial and literary preservation homes in the immediate postwar world, which is quite important and would have fit into the overall worldwide de-contextualizing Kafka as a human and writer thesis.

In short, this 'book' has a confused identity: in searching for Kafka through creating as much ambiguity as possible, Watroba likewise loses any concrete identity to what she's written.

[Ben Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

By turns travelogue and biographical analysis, Watroba's study is a hymn to this most enduring of modernist writers. His worldwide appeal turns out to be a gratifying thing.

[nilab · Rating 3 out of 5]

kafka was a vegetarian!!!

[Stephen Maldon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed reading this book, for several reasons. It is very well written (except for some minor repetitions across chapters). Its author sure did her job regarding the necessary research—not a minor feat when faced with the daunting task of writing something of value about (to quote from the dust jacket text) Franz Kafka's life and afterlife: I dare any literary scholar to write a guide that is half as readable and equally exciting as Karolina Wątroba's (I trust she won't resent my restoring the diacritic on the first vowel of her last name). Unlike some books that purport to chronicle some personal or scholarly "search for Kafka", which are somewhat deceivingly framed as crime novels, this book is candid about what it attempts to do (namely, to answer the question "what makes Kafka Kafka" focusing on how all kinds of readers have responded to the man and the myth) and does, in my opinion, deliver—with panache, I would add.

More importantly, I think Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka passes my own little test for what I consider a good book. First, did it motivate me to actually do something? Most definitely: if nothing else, it made me revisit some of the texts by Kafka that Wątroba discusses at some length, but it also led me to reread other of his pieces and, of course, many a diary entry. Second, did I discover something precious in it? You bet: even though I have read several Kafka-centered novels, stories, or travelogues written in languages other than English and German, it made me realize that I had unforgivably neglected the East Asian offerings (especially considering that many of them are readily available in solid Western translations). Last, will I come back to it? I probably won't reread the passages about the English plays and the outlook on AI anytime soon; on the other hand, and rather surprisingly, I suspect I will return to the chapters on Berlin and Prague.

I would give it 4.5 stars if I could. Is this a masterpiece? I imagine the author would hasten to point out that it isn't. Is it the go-to book about Kafka's writings, as well as his life and afterlife? Hardly. But it is one of the most accessible, enjoyable, and inspiring introductory treatments of this inexhaustible subject I have encountered so far. This is truly a welcome addition to the Kafka shelves in my personal library!

[Jeff Keehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed in this book but that is probably due to the hype it received by reviewers. The author makes the case that unlike many classics, the works of Kafka are perhaps even more relevant today than they were during his lifetime. She delves a little into his biography, which is perhaps what interested me most. We learn that he had serious relationships with 4 different women and was engaged twice but never married. He wrote many letters. But his consumption (TB) was busy undermining his health years before he succumbed in 1924. His family was all murdered by the Nazis, so his early death seems almost a mercy. I have read quite a few works by Kafka so when the author talks about Dearest Father, a long letter he wrote to his father to explain why he never lived up to the old man's expectations, I am pleasantly surprised to hear something said about a brief work I read in my early twenties when I was quite taken with Kafka. The book ends by focusing on the current movement in South Korea to create world-class literature. The Vegetarian is such a book. It is indeed Kafkaesque. But it seems almost unnatural for a government to support the arts is this way because art is usually subversive. On the whole, I am happy I read the book but not much more informed as a result.

[Dominic H · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an engaging, accessible and compelling study of, as Watroba puts it, 'how Kafka became Kafka'. It journeys from what textual scholarship can tell us to the popularity of Kafka in South Korea, stopping at many fascinating places en route. Watroba has a real gift for spotting the key detail of any aspect of the story and conveying it concisely and clearly. A pleasure to read and learn from. To take one example, her riveting account of Malcom Pasley's examination of the manuscript of Der Prozess (amongst other things Pasley was able to prove that Kafka wrote the beginning and end before anything else and explain why he disassembled the notebooks it was written in). But here, as in the rest of the book, Watroba isn't content to rest on a summary of the scholarship. She reflects intelligently on what it might mean for our own reading.

I listened to the audiobook. Deborah Baim's narration is adequate, no more than that, and is unfortunately littered with some bizarre mispronunciations. Audible do include as a PDF Watroba's invaluable endnotes.

[Hsandlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully written journey through Kafka’s life and the authors relationship with it and its history. You will learn a lot about Franz Kafka from multiple perspectives, not just the man but the idea of “Kafka.” I knew about his life, the classic story of the depressed author from Prague, but I didn’t know just how misleading that story is and how important the story of “the classic story of the depressed author from Prague” is to understanding the man.

I went in hoping to learn more about Franz Kafka’s life and came out with that knowledge and so much more critical context and history. This book also is my absolute favorite genre: non-fiction that’s as much about the author as it is the thing in the title. It is nice to try to separate yourself from your writing but it’s an impossible task so you might as well lean into it and give the reader more clarity on your perspective. Plus, you get a narrative and story to follow outside of the subject.

[Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure I learned very much about Kafka’s life or literature. Excepting the fascinating analysis of The Metamorphosis and of a couple of short stories, it’s not even clear that Karolina Watroba has read much Kafka.

In fact, I learned far too much about the author’s inane idiosyncrasies as a ‘reader’ or ‘travel blogger’; in other words, this book was clearly Watroba’s vanity project.

Despite the attempt at a fresh format in the biography plus literary analysis genre, chapters ended up drearily formulaic. The final chapter on Kafka in Asia was a horrendous lowlight.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many books on Kafka that it's hard to know what to read about him. This is an excellent book if you care about Kafka's reception. I learned a lot about the role he played in a variety of world literatures, especially Korean lit.

[Sean de la Rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A review

Interesting read with new facts on his personal life. Thought the pieces on his appeal in Korea and surrounding areas was a bit over done.

[Manish · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://manishmohandas.com/2025/05/07...

[ana neu · Rating 4 out of 5]

i learnt so much about Kafka and found even more of myself in him than i ordinarily expected. to write like him would be to enter that castle on the hill.

[Sabrina AD · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book feels made for me but I just didn't gel with it.

Positive:

-The literacy criticism and the contextualisation of Kafka's work is really good. The idea of the Metamorphosis as Brexit is inspired and really gave me a new way of thinking about the work

Negatives (oh boy):

-The author has a MASSIVE blind spot for her own preconceptions of Franz Kafka, she mostly brushes over sex is Kafka's work and his life. I think she wants him to be a very urbane figure which he is but he was also a massive hound. The section about visiting Goathe's house with Max Brod, feels like she wants more from him but other of their diaries of that entire trip are lads on tour.

-There is an element of snotty comments about Kafka fans following bits of his life, without being rude, working at Oxford doesn't mean that you aren't a tourist too. In fact I would argue there is something more pure about following in Kafka's footsteps because you like him and his work.

-The section about visiting Kafka's grave, people leave shit on people's graves all the time. I think Kafka would love getting notes, he is a note writer in life and I think its something he could understand. Reading them is weird and publishing their contents even in paraphrase is even more so.

-This book does a bit too much death of the author for my liking, fifty per cent of Kafka's work has him as the protagonist and he is processing his life through his work. The trial is about his truly messy first break up with Felice, it has the Kafka mess of also being about his work, and his family and technology. But I think you can interpt it anyway you like but removing the context does everyone a disservice.

This whole book is about the relationship people have with and to Kafka and I think the thing it really misses is that people have intimate relationship with him and that is completely ok. And however you want to channel that is fine. I just couldn't gel with the tone and massive blindspots of this work.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been some 40 years since I read a whole bunch of Kafka novels and stories. While I remember them - I was going to say fondly, but that's not the word for the peculiar form of enjoyment one can get from much of his work - I haven't thought much about them of late. But this book, with the sharp image of a young Kafka looking so very clearly into a future much of which he would never see, grabbed my attention on the library shelf the other day.

Watroba is an engaging guide through various aspects of Kafka's life, through encounters with various readers and their reactions to his work, and through specific aspects of the ways Kafka's work changes in different translations. The book is by a literary scholar who writes for a general audience - I was going to say there's a minimum of jargon but now I know the word "jargon" comes from a German term for yiddish, as explained here in a fascinating chapter on Kafka's life as a Jewish person in a time and place where Zionism was building up headway.

The last chapter, by the way, makes a great case for the influence of Kafka on modern feminist novels in South Korea, which makes me want to get around to reading some of those.

It's a good clear exploratory work on the ways a great writer's work is transformed every time it is read.