Replicating the rhythm of Kafka’s Amerika is, nonetheless, the greatest challenge Godbout faces. His Amerika is condensed, skimming over some of Kafka’s perplexingly long descriptions or conversations, which helps readability but sacrifices some of their peculiarity in the process.

Godbout’s adaptation was first written and drawn in French (translated from the original German), meaning that this English translation is not one, but two, steps removed from the original text. Fortunately, aside from the appearance of a handful of anachronistic curse words in one scene, there was only one segment where the story suffered as a result. In the final chapter, Karl seeks out employment at the Grand Nature Theater of Oklahoma and is reunited with an acquaintance who makes her living as part of a chorus of trumpet-blowing angels. She encourages him to present his candidacy to the theatre, and upon being hired he tries to find her again only to be told that the travelling musicians had gone on to the next town. Karl responds, “Too bad. One of the angels is a friend of mine…” In the 1946 English translation, however, Karl responds, “I had a friend among the angels.” Fortune and misfortune strike our protagonist with simultaneous blows, but there is a subtle serendipity that follows him, too. The Grand Nature Theater of Oklahoma seems too good to be true: will Karl finally find his place in America? Or is he bound to meet some truly unsavoury ending, traipsing foolishly into the theatre, a Pinocchio lured into Stromboli’s nefarious playland? Amerika is a light affair by Kafka’s standards, and his long-time friend and literary executor Max Brod maintained that Kafka intended it to end on a “note of reconciliation.”