![]() ![]() Cronenberg cites the character in his introduction: “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. ![]() Perhaps his most obvious connection to “The Metamorphosis,” however, is his 1986 remake of “The Fly,” in which a research scientist named Seth Brundle loses his humanity (both physically and spiritually) after inadvertently fusing himself with a housefly. Ballard’s “Crash,” as well as, more recently, Don DeLillo’s “Cosmopolis.” Rendering the unnatural as natural is at the heart of Cronenberg’s work, as well his films include “Scanners,” “Dead Ringers” and “Videodrome.” He is also a director with a strong literary bent, having adapted William S. The sentence echoes Kafka’s own first line, the greatest (I think) in all of literature: “When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.” By turns specific and vague - what were those troubled dreams, Cronenberg wonders, and do they have anything to do with Gregor’s predicament? - it is an opening that destabilizes us from the outset, rendering the unnatural as natural. Norton: 126 pp., $10.95 paper) by raising an unexpected comparison: “I woke up one morning recently,” he writes, “to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man.” David Cronenberg begins his introduction to Susan Bernofsky’s new translation of “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka (W.W. ![]()
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