Give It Up: And Other Short Stories
by Franz Kafka, Peter Kuper
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Book Summary Information
Author: Franz Kafka, Peter KuperEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1995-03
ISBN: 1561631256
Number of pages: 64
Publisher: Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing
Book Reviews of Give It Up: And Other Short Stories
Book Review: Visual improvisations
Summary: 5 Stars
From the introduction by Jules Feiffer:
"To 'classically illustrate' Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky et al doesn't make them accessible, it makes them mute... add pictures and panels and balloons to the text, and the secret of communion that gives fiction its power is betrayed... Kuper... doesn't do what I hate, he does what I love. Jazz. This book is a series of riffs, visual improvisations on short takes by the old master. It becomes a diverting, even daring, high wire act... and it works. Like Bird doing "Embraceable You", it may not be Gershwin, but it's art. And I, for one, talk back to it."
Peter Kuper never writes text for his for-the-sake-of-argument-let's-call-it comics; if, for some reason, he does use text, he borrows it from Kafka. Give It Up! is a collection of short stories by Kafka adapted by Kuper, prior to his more ambitious attempt with 'The Metamorphosis', published separately; for the most part, the stories in this collection are better. Kuper stretches the bounds of sequential art with these stories, and comes up with stuff that is highly expressive and incredibly communicative, and compliments the old master's text perfectly while also making them entirely new. That much can be seen from the very first story, 'A Little Fable', one of Kafka's most famed creations -
"Alas, the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.
You only need to change your direction, said the cat and ate it up."
Kuper spreads this very short text - and one of the most beautiful and succinct written in the English language - over four pages, but what he does with them is absolutely awe inspiring, so that it's criminal to even refer to it as comics. He resigns to none of the common assumptions and rules of the medium, and instead lets his imagination run wild and uses the page spreads and compositions serve as a tool to help create the very feeling of claustrophobia that the text does, but he never loses touch with the reader who always knows exactly how to interpret the pages. In 'The System' Kuper performed the difficult task of creating truly communicative and involving comics with no text whatsoever; he manages an equally impressive fit in these short stories. This is a beautiful book and highly recommended to any comic book reader and any art and/or literature lover.
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