All the people you no longer are

The excerpt below is from the first chapter narrated by Greta, Gregor Samsa's sister.

I was twelve. Then I was seventeen. Like driving or music, when you are gliding through those years, they feel they will never end. Once they are finished with you, you have such a difficult time recalling them in any sort of detail it seems they very well may have happened to a friend you no longer see, and you just heard about them secondhand, or maybe you read about them in a letter. It isn't you any more. Imagine all the people you no longer are. - from Anxious Pleasures, a novel after Kafka by Lance Olsen.

I also loved the paragraph below, which is from the last chapter narrated by Greta. It delves into an interesting existential theme of "seeing yourself as a stranger in your own mind".

They say people travel either to find something or to lose something, but I wonder if maybe it isn't a little bit of both. The shock is how, returning from a foreign country, returning from crowded dreams or a piece of gorgeous music, you discover you are precisely the same person you were before setting off. Precisely the same person, and precisely a different person. Traveling always makes you at least two people at once. It is good for you, this doubleness. It allows you to see yourself as a stranger in your own mind.

That last sentence is a gem! Coincidentally, my quote-bot on the left of my blog spits out this Socrates quote - The unexamined life is not worth living. Update: On a second refresh, this Oscar Wilde quote: Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about. Hmm....!

Unfortunately, although Anxious Pleasures is a very creative and interesting novel*, I will have to get back to it at some later date as various other things have taken over my life these past two weeks. I should perhaps read Kafka's The Metamorphosis again before I read this one to enjoy it more thoroughly. Olsen is also the author of Nietzsche's Kisses, a novel that I had once perused through and put on hold to be read at some later day. Hopefully the day when I will get back to all these books-to-read arrives soon!

* In this novel...

Olsen takes on Franz Kafka's surreal novella, The Metamorphosis and ingeniously adapts the story line to multiple perspectives. In the original, Kafka chose authorial omniscience to recount the misfortunes of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin." Olsen surveys the unsettling events in the Samsa household from the viewpoints of, respectively, Gregor's sister Greta, his parents, the kitchen staff, and even a contemporary London woman perusing Kafka's yarn in a British Museum reading room.

You can read an excerpt of the book here and a review here.