“What do I have in common with the Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself”. Nothing could better express the essence of Franz Kafka, a man described by his friends as living behind a ‘glass wall’.Kafka wrote in the tradition of the great Yiddish storytellers, whose stock-in-trade was bizarre fantasy, tainted with hilarity and self-abasement. What he brought to this tradition was, however, an almost unbearably expanded consciousness. Alienated from his roots, his family, his surroundings, and primarily from his own body, Kafka created a unique literary language in which to hide away, transforming himself into a cockroach, an ape, a dog, a mole or a circus artiste who starves himself to death before admiring crowds.David Mairowitz’s brilliant text and the illustrations of the world’s greatest underground comic artist, Robert Crumb, help us to see beyond the cliché ‘Kafkaesque’ and to peer through the glass wall at the unique creature on display there.