Of bugs and mice

During the day / Gregor crawled back and forth / along the walls / and the ceiling, would sound like a line from Dr. Seuss, but these are telling the story of Gregor Samsa, the man-turned-beetle in Franz Kafka's Metamorphossis.

Matthue Roth, a writer and video game designer, has a kid's version of Kafka, My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents, and Giant Bugs.

According to the New Yorker, the kid's Kafka isn't a cross between Shrek and Go The F**k to Sleep, but an engaging children's book in the tradition of Lewis Carroll's, Roald Dahl's, or Neil Gaiman's fairy tales. 

Children may have a more sensible encounter with the Kafkaesque universe than adults, who have known to have been spooked out by the omnipresence of the Freudian unheimleich in our day-to-day living, something that Kafka excelled in bringing out in his writing.

What scared adults--the notion that evil is banal--might just enchant children:

We are sure, as mature people with 401(k)s and digital subscriptions to the Times, that we will never be stalked by an amorous, sparkly vampire, but we are not sure that we won’t be charged and prosecuted for a crime we aren’t even sure we committed. We can tell our children that there is no Big Bad Wolf, but we can’t assure them that they won’t be prevented from reaching their goals by an unseen bureaucracy intent upon burying them in paperwork. In this way—not the bloody, but the banal—Kafka’s work becomes more spooky than the original Brothers Grimm, in which Snow White’s evil queen is forced to dance to death in scalding iron shoes. And though this might be taken as an argument for sheltering kids from Kafka, consider that the urge to avoid feeling fear altogether is stronger in grown-up humans than in small ones. “Grownups desperately need to feel safe,” Maurice Sendak said in 1993, “and then they project that onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are… they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something.” Perhaps Kafka’s works can be best confronted by children, who have that empyrean way of digesting the surreal and decoding symbols, who are braver, in their innocent beliefs, than we can ever be.