The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Anxious Pleasures: A Novel After Kafka, by Lance Olsen
reviewed by Renée E. D’Aoust

 

Lance Olsen’s anxious pleasures: a novel after kafka is a surreal text of haunting, interlacing narratives. Olsen engages in direct conversation with the ghost of Kafka and with every character in his own and in Kafka’s book; in addition, Olsen adds contemporary Margaret, who is reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis for the first time. Margaret’s studies allow Olsen to include literary criticism of The Metamorphosis, but it isn’t a sleight-of-hand inclusion. Olsen suggests that as readers we are as much creators as critics, and Margaret shows the psychic struggles of such engagement with literature; for that reason, reading Olsen becomes a quest—not because it is difficult or veiled, but because in Olsen’s world, the reader becomes as important an imaginative tool as the text. Olsen is particularly skilled at creating a burlesque grotesque, yet still lyrical fiction, possible to interpret on so many levels one becomes giddy, as if riding a roller coaster through an ever-changing freak show. We all remember Kafka’s opening line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” In anxious pleasures, we don’t directly read Gregor Samsa’s voice, but we surely hear its raspy echoes, recognizing it most firmly through Gregor’s sister Grete. In one of Grete’s sections, she muses, “Growing up is a process of losing things.” Perhaps the novel hits us most the places where we ourselves have lost. Yet Gregor Samsa’s family tries to impose normality onto the grotesque, ridiculously clinging to familiarity: “We linger, clasping each other around the waist, admiring, taking pleasure in this string of breaths. A family.” Kafka made a place for the illogical tale that defies classification. In anxious pleasures, a graceful, haunting work, Lance Olsen reminds us that defying classification has lasting, imaginative value.