Cover me

A month or so ago, a friend of my son's made him a CD mix of songs by the band Fountains of Wayne; it's been living in the car ever since. The music is terrific, and also somewhat unexpected: Among other things, there's a cover of Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time," which, stripped of her cloying voice and studio overproduction, reveals itself to be (dare I say it) a pretty rocking little song.

Listening to it this morning, I was reminded of one of my enduring frustrations with writing — that you can't cover a book or story by someone else. You can quote, you can review, you can translate, you can pay homage, but to create a literal cover version? Literature has no mechanism for such an act.

Or does it? As I think about it, I can come up with two possible exceptions: Philip Roth's 1972 novella "The Breast," which spins off Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" to tell the story of a man who awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find himself changed into a monstrous breast in his bed, and Peter Kuper's "The Metamorphosis," a graphic novel version of the same Kafka story that, in its own odd way, is so faithful to the original that to call it an adaptation is to entirely miss the point.

Is it telling that both have their origins in the same piece of writing? Is it something about Kafka, or about "The Metamorphosis" itself? Are there other literary covers that I'm missing? Maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg, a subgenre waiting to be found.

— David L. Ulin

Comments

[Sarah Weinman]

William Lashner, aka Tyler Knox, flipped the story to have a cockroach wake up as a man in KOCKROACH.

[Nakul Krishna]

There are retellings surely, for I'm not sure if they count by your reckoning. Homer, Greek myth, and the countless versions all the way to the present day. Simon Armitage's Odyssey, Christopher Logue's War Music, for example, neither of which is a straightforward translation... They seem to have the same relationship to their originals as a cover to its original.

[Matt]

Chris Eaton (the singer of one of my favorite bands I discovered this year, Rock Plaza Central), wrote a novel called GRAMMAR ARCHITECT: A COVER OF THOMAS HARDY'S A PAIR OF BLUE EYES. So there's a novel that's claiming itself as a cover version of the original, if nothing else. I haven't actually read this though, to be honest-- But if his prose is anything like his songwriting, it's probably pretty great.

[Carolyn Kellogg]

How about Ben Ehrenreich's "The Suitors" (which remakes The Odyssey) or Irena Reyn's "What Happened to Anna K." (covering Anna Karenina)?

[Lou Bank]

There was a book a few years ago that took the victim's view of Lolita. It was called Mr. Fish Something. And what about children's books? How many versions of classic tales like The Three Pigs or The Gingerbread Man are there? I've found versions from places like Africa and India.