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Meowmorphosis (2014)

by Coleridge Cook(Favorite Author)

3.02 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1299574335 (ISBN13: 9781299574335)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Quirk Books

review 1: I am a big fan of Quirk Classics. I was so excited to see a Quirk book with a cute fuzzy wuzzy kitten - Joy!There are so many things wrong with this book, I doubt I shall recall all of them, but here goes:Our main character is a adorable kitten. He leaves his room & when he is shoved back in his room he can barely fit through the door. His big round belly is too big to fit through the door - yet he walked out of the room just fine. Not only that but since when do kittens have gigantic round bellies? I tend to surround myself with kittens as much as possible & though their bellies can be rounded, they are not out of proportion with the general size of the kitten. Anyway, while being pushed & shoved through the door our poor giant kitten had his side scraped up & he was sore... more. On top of that he has tiny little legs out of proportion with his body. I had no idea kittens had tiny little legs.The problem here is the original story our character turns into a bug. Since I never read the original I am going to take a guess that he might have turned into a beetle seeing how the description of the kitten fits the description of a beetle much better except the author gives the kitten striped fur which makes me think the bug had stripes.Next our giant kitten who cannot fit through his bedroom door manages to fit under the couch & he hides there.Next when our giant kitten who can fit under a couch but not through a doorway but who can jump out a window, goes outside no one screams & yells in terror of the giant kitten creature.There is a whole community of cats who were once humans that humans think are cats. I don't get the impression that these used to be humans cats are giant. If anything it gives me the impression that all cats were once humans.There are just so many examples where he is a huge kitten, yet is he? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. On top of that the kitten character is pathetic & you have no sympathy for such a looser of his own making. Note, I gather that is the personality of the original character making me think I don't want to read the original.No effort was put into this at all. In no way shape or form is this anywhere near the quality of Pride Prejudice & Zombies, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, Sense Sensibility & Sea Monsters, or even Android Karenina - which I didn't particularly care for, but was way the heck better than this junk!If you are considering this book thinking you are going to get a silly cute good time, don't bother. It is not here. This is a total waste & I wish I had selected something else.
review 2: Other reviewers are correct that the beginning of the book is a near verbatim re-write of Kafka's Metamorphosis with a cat instead of a cockroach, but the whole center section many claim is "useless" or doesn't make sense is actually a parody of Kafka's The Trial. I have read Kafka but wouldn't say I'm that knowledgeable however I enjoyed the combining of these two stories very much and think it is quite well done. Little inserts like p. 121: "Symbolism is depressing; its meaning is always deferred. Nothing is what it is, only what it means, and I mean nothing but that the world is ugly and men are uglier still." and p. 126: "This is the essence of a cat's psychology: we can only endure humans for so long before, well, there is a sunbeam or a bit of fish in the larder and who can really be asked to listen to modernist symbolism when such things are at hand?" Indeed.It's fascinating to see how different the story can be read when there is an acceptable, furry, adorable animal involved instead of a commonly disliked insect. Even more so considering the last paragraph of the book: p. 200 "Once such instance [of ambiguous terms in translation] is found in the first sentence of this very work, The Meowmorphosis. English translators have often rendered the word Ungeziefer as "insect" or "cockroach"; in Middle German, however, Ungeziefer literally means "unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice" or, as the clever and true thinker will recognize: cat."The tongue-in-cheek, semi-accurate Kafka bio at the back of the book should probably be a foreward to set the tone. p. 197: "Kafka's work began to drift more and more toward the dark and paranoid instead of the light comedy sketches that had so delighted his university friends. Perhaps we lost a great comedian in that lost Kafka - a Bohemian Belushi, a Czech Carlin. Alas! but we must press on." p. 199: "Truly, Franz Kafka was a model for the modern office worker: deeply unhappy, but spending his weekends working on his "novel" and messing around with asbestos." (the rest of the paragraph is gold, too - but then I'm just typing the book over...) It's clever and I'm interested to see some purely original work by Cook.The book is topped off with Discussion Questions - my favorite being: p. 206 "9. Franz Kafka had some issues, didn't he?"I like this series of books by Quirk, particularly for folks who don't have the patience for the originals. There's just enough silliness to get you through but still learn the important aspects of the literature itself. less

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