A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library)

I don't deny that Kafka has a very out-of-the-box way of writing, but to be honest it didn't do it for me. While I wouldn't recommend it to someone looking for a light/fun read, if you're looking for something that will test your grip on reality, I'd take a gander. Definitely gets you talking.

The Trial is one of my favorite stories -- my review is poor because of the design of the book itself.

This copy does that stupid thing where the edges of the pages are intentionally frayed / uneven, making it difficult to flip through. Also, who in the right mind had the idea to put the page numbers on the *inside* of the pages? That makes it, again, impossible to flip to a specific page.

Franz Kafka is without a shadow of a doubt the most fascinating writer of the modern era. His influence on world literature is, without exaggeration, enormous, and far more important than that of, for example, a Thomas Mann, despite G. Lukács, who claimed the contrary. K.s are omnipresent in the literature of the last hundred years.

Franz Kafka was an extremely judicious and lucid writer. His message has been willingly accepted and adopted by philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists, ideologues and literary movements. But his novels contain also an outspoken political vision: the coming of totalitarian terror, both of the right and the left. At the last moment, he changed the word 'socialist' in 'The Trial' by a more general one. His 'Trial' was no longer restricted to the population of 'socialist' regimes, but to all dictatorial systems.
In Kafka's universe, the real power centres are elusive or invisible. Communication channels are blocked or release confusing messages. Individuals become victims/the playball of an inaccessable and paralyzing bureaucracy of apparatchiks.

A better translation of the German title 'Das Schloß' would have been 'The Fortress' or 'The Stronghold'. The German word 'Schloß' also means 'lock': the entry of the Castle is firmly closed.
In this unfinished novel, a land surveyor wants to start his work at the Castle after receiving an appointment letter. He is confronted with a hostile bureaucracy.

Franz Kafka was an ingenious visionary. His work cannot be more to the point today. 'The Castle' illustrates the battle of an innocent man against a hidden power and its bureaucracy. The communication channels (the media) are infiltrated and their information (news) is fake.

An nerve-racking, implacable, hallucinating and at the same time hyperrealist.work.
An eternal masterpiece.

Thanks to Thomas Mann’s HOMAGE at the start of the book, we know that The Castle is “through and through an autobiographical novel” (p. xiv).

I first became acquainted with Kafka’s prose over forty years ago as a student of German language and literature in Vienna, Austria. At the time, we read some of his short stories and novellas, and I thought he was possibly the most extraordinary writer I’d ever read—or, at the very least, sui generis. (I should insert here that living and working in the former—but then-inexplicably delusionary—capital of the Hapsburg Empire certainly helped, as trying to eke out a student’s existence in Vienna made Kafka’s surrealistic take on the world all too real.) Reading him now in The Castle, however, is an altogether different experience.

Of course, it could’ve been that German was a language I was still learning and that I consequently couldn’t “feel” it in the same way I can “feel” the English translation I have at hand.

In any case, what I’m now sensing, just fifty-four pages into the novel, is somewhat akin to how Kafka expresses the reaction of our hero (quite simply known as “K.”) in the arms of a young barmaid he’s stumbled upon in the village neighboring the castle: “There hours went past, hours in which they breathed as one, in which their hearts beat as one, hours in which K. was haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than ever man had wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness, and yet whose enchantment was such that one could only go on and lose oneself further.”

As for the principal character (other than K. himself) of this story, the following on pp. 128 – 129 is probably as accurate a depiction as appears anywhere in the book: “The Castle, whose contours were already beginning to dissolve, lay silent as ever; never yet had K. seen there the slightest sign of life—perhaps it was quite impossible to recognize anything at that distance, and yet the eye demanded it and could not endure that stillness. When K. looked at the Castle, often it seemed to him as if he were observing someone who sat quietly there gazing in front of him, not lost in thought and so oblivious of everything, but free and untroubled, as if he were alone with nobody to observe him, and yet must notice that he was observed, and all the same remained with his calm not even slightly disturbed; and really—one did not know whether it was cause or effect—the gaze of the observer could not remain concentrated there, but slid away. This impression today was strengthened still further by the early dusk; the longer he looked(,) the less he could make out(—)and the deeper everything was lost in the twilight.”

This surrealistic sense of place is, I believe, further reinforced by Kafka’s sense of people, their functions, and their absolute incapacity to act, as we find in this delivery by Olga on pp. 226 – 227: “‘(h)e ought long ago to have had, not a uniform, for there aren’t many in the Castle, but a suit provided by the department, and he has been promised one, but in things of that kind the Castle moves slowly, and the worst of it is that one never knows what this slowness means; it can mean that the matter’s being considered, but it can also mean that it hasn’t yet been taken up, that Barnabas for instance is still on probation, and in the long run it can also mean that the whole thing has been settled, that for some reason or other the promise has been canceled and that Barnabas will never get his suit. One can never find out exactly what is happening, or only a long time afterwards. We have a saying here, perhaps you’ve heard it: Official decisions are as shy as young girls.’”

Perhaps one last citation—in this case, a description of the servants on pp. 360 – 361—will suffice to give you some idea of what you can expect to find in your reading of The Castle: “(f)rom all distracting observations(,) K. would soon return to watching the servant; truly what K. had been told about servants in general, about their slackness, their easy life, their arrogance, did not apply to this servant; there were doubtless exceptions among the servants too or, what was more probable, various groups among them, for here as K. noticed, there were many nuances of which he had up to now scarcely had so much as a glimpse. What he particularly liked was this servant’s inexorability. In his struggle with these stubborn little rooms—to K. it often seemed to be a struggle with the rooms, since he scarcely ever caught a glimpse of the occupants—the servant never gave up. His strength did sometimes fail—whose strength would not have failed?—but he soon recovered, slipped down from the little cart, and, holding himself straight, clenching his teeth, returned to the attack against the door that had to be conquered. And it would happen that he would be beaten back twice or three times and that in a very simple way, solely by means of that confounded silence, and nevertheless was still not defeated. Seeing that he could not achieve anything by frontal assault, he would try another method—for instance, if K. understood rightly, cunning. He would then seemingly abandon the door, so to speak(,) allowing it to exhaust its own taciturnity, turn his attention to other doors, after a while return, call the other servant, all this ostentatiously and noisily, and begin piling up files on the threshold of the shut door, as though he had changed his mind, and as though there were no justification for taking anything away from this gentleman, but, on the contrary, something to be allotted to him. Then he would walk on, sill, however, keeping an eye on the door and then when the gentleman, as usually happened, soon cautiously opened the door in order to pull the files inside, in a few leaps the servant was there, thrust his foot between the door and the doorpost, so forcing the gentleman at least to negotiate with him face to face, which then usually led after all to a more or less satisfactory result.”

(If you feel rather out of breath—not to say out of sorts—after reading the above, fear not! This isn’t even half the paragraph, which goes on for another seven pages without a break. I, personally, sometimes feel that reading Kafka’s prose is akin to trying to manage a Rubik’s cube with one hand—that, or to follow a Möbius strip to its source.)

These citations are, I believe, as good as any others in giving us a sense of the adjective ‘Kafkaesque.’ Kafka’s is a world—as much in his own head as in the society immediately surrounding him—in which nothing is allowed to upset the status quo because the powers-that-be like things just the way they are. The prospect of change—never mind improvement in one’s personal lot—is simply a delusion. As has been said elsewhere (and, most recently, that I know of, by Gorbachev—the former leader of the former Soviet Union) in answer to the question What is life? “You live; you suffer; you die.”

Kafka did just that—but also asked that all of his works be burned upon his death. We have his editor, Max Brod, to thank that they were not. And to enjoy—or at least muse upon—what I previously suggested was a writer sui generis—one of a kind. A word of caution: this particular musing will not make for good beach reading. Best to place yourself in a location more Poe-etic: i.e., in a dungeon somewhere between a bottomless pit and a relentless pendulum. In such a setting, Kafka’s work might make better sense.

RRB
08/23/16
Brooklyn, NY

The book was purchased from the store.com

I only read half of this book. It didn't make sense and if there was a trial (none at least as far as I read)it would have had to be written in a spectacular manner to lend any credence to this book. It was all about large rooms, small rooms long hallways,stairs and very brief conversations that also didn't make sense to this reader. Franz Kafka may have been a great writer, but not in my viewpoint. Page after page of gibberish between characters that seemed to come out of nowhere.
I thought I would eventually get to "The Trial," but I just couldn't plod my way through any more of this type of writing. It may have been because of the translation, but, at any rate, I felt that I made a giant mistake in ordering "The Trial."
I gave 2 stars because maybe my criticism was not warranted. I am sure that if one is a devotee of Franz Kafka they would find my review unfair.
NOT my cup of tea.

Josef K. is a run-of-the-mill bank manager who is minding his own business when one day he is put under house arrest and told that he is to go on trial. It is ambiguous as to whether he did anything naughty. As he is not told the nature of his alleged crime, he does not know why he is being detained.

Such are the opening pages of Kafka's THE TRIAL. Given that he is not informed of what he is charged with, his trial emulates Judgment Day in the book of Revelation; he must go over his entire life and defend every questionable action as he is unsure what the judiciary is "looking for." With the help of his father he hires a lawyer to defend him, but the defense counsel does little but muddy the waters even more than they were before. The stress of being accused of a crime weighs on him and adversely affects his job performance > he comes off house arrest. What is a poor banker to do?

Anyone who has read anything by Kafka is not likely to be surprised that the storyline is bizarre and twisted. This is a book which is mentioned quite a bit when it comes to 20th century literature and post-modern philosophical studies. Unfortunately, I wanted to like it more than I really did. It was a bit too fragmented for myself (it was unofficially unfinished @ the time of Kafka's death). It is more of a thought experiment than a novel. That said, it is a truly fascinating thought-experiment as it delves into the human psyche's conception of guilt.

The novel stands alongside any of Sam Beckett's plays which are known as the theater-of-the-absurd genre. More importantly, with the current chaos & confusion of the U.S. government with a lunatic in charge, the plot-line is more relatable than it has been in many yrs. People who enjoy the current novel are admonished to also read 1984 (Signet Classics). There are some dystopian parallels between Kafka & Orwell which we (unfortunately) see bearing fruit in the present day.

This is a tough nut to crack. There are the usual hallmarks of Kafka's writing: a sinister, de-humanizing bureaucracy, an atmosphere of stasis and expectations perpetually thwarted and, above all, a profound sense of human loneliness.

But The Castle takes those elements, which are literally synonymous with Kafka's name, and mixes in a wide range of other dynamics: occasional bits of slapstick humor, surreal imagery, small town pettiness, etc. This is Kafka's 'biggest' work and, without a doubt, his most mysterious and elusive.

Yet just like his other work, The Castle seems to simultaneously synthesize and reject any particular reading or interpretation. Is the titular castle a person? Is it modernity? Is it man's search for meaning? Is it God itself? Or is it just a big old building you can't go to? If you like your fiction irreducible and irresolvable, this is absolutely for you.

A few weeks ago by accident I stumbled across Orson Welles' 1962 version of the Franz Kafka novel The Trial. Intrigued, and knowing next to nothing about Welles, I was next led to the 2015 documentary Magician: the Astonishing Life & Work of Orson Welles which, among other things, suggests that Welles had remade Kafka's book in his own image. Finally, as my own real life abruptly spiraled into something approaching surrealism, I broke down and bought a copy of Kafka's novel. The time was ripe to take the plunge.

The copy I bought was Breon Mitchell's 1998 translation. What struck me most was how little Welles had changed the story in his adaptation. In fact, I would say Welles presented a pretty straight-forward presentation of Kafka. Steven Soderbergh's 1991 film Kafka has long been a favorite, and now so is the Welles film. If you're interested in Kafka-the-writer, and/or the novel-version of The Trial, you should look for both of these films.

The book is so well known that a review at this point seems superfluous. Much of the time the reader senses that the book is probably occurring as a dream. The protagonist called K. often demonstrates a profound lack of comprehension of his own mind and psyche, and an insouciant willingness to rationalize away any dissatisfying recognition of his own foibles and unsympathetic propensities. Presumably the guilt of which he is accused arises from these unexamined blemishes on his soul.

In fact The Trial doesn't gel as a novel. It is a fragmentary first draft of a novel, a work in progress that never found its plot line. It is apparent Kafka kept writing and writing loosely-connected scenes in able to build up settings and characters, but he never quite hammered it all together into a coherent story. The book's conclusion, while probably inevitable in some form, occurs suddenly and without satisfaction. It is tacked on in a slipshod fashion, and one senses that Kafka composed it quite quickly, almost certainly intending to improve it considerably at a later date that never came.

Still, I have read many legitimate novels which are far more tedious than this unsteady draft. The Trial continues to raise questions about troubling social behaviors that arise in human cultures. Unspoken and unexamined paranoia and guilt are probably destined to be our companions throughout all human history, at least anytime more than two or three individuals interact. Kafka's vision of that uneasy companionship is a telling one.

This book is very prophetic and scary. This is the exact persecutions Christians are facing all over the world. We are being put in kangaroo courts and being accused of absurd charges that have no merit whatsoever. Liberals want to make it a crime to be a Christian. Our freedom of religion is being taken away. They're putting up a statue of Satan in Oklahoma's stakehouse! Not of the Ten Commandments, BUT OF SATAN! Read this book and open your eyes to whats going on in the world.

This is a review of the Naxos audiobook. The narrator does an excellent job of conveying the story and, from what I've seen of the written version, it's a lot easier to get through as an audiobook. (Let someone else figure out how to read the long sentences with too many commas.) That said, it's difficult to listen to a whole book about a man getting nowhere in his quest to speak with someone in authority. It reminds me of some "customer service" experiences I've had, except that the story here goes on for weeks. There are numerous blind alleys, and several seemingly senseless situations where one later learns a totally unexpected and possibly plausible explanation (such as the real reason why the messenger is so bad at delivering messages). Except that once you start to accept one explanation of odd behavior, another one may come along to raise more doubts. Bureaucracy takes a beating throughout, as the incredible and byzantine system imposes obstacles at every turn and its inefficiency is blatant. Other reviewers have cited the dream-like character of much of it, but to me it seemed more like a study in how human behavior is affected by culture and context -- people behave oddly because their society demands this behavior for acceptance and even survival. I also felt at times that this was a parody of deeply intellectual writing - incredible streams of conversational gobbledegook and double talk serving as justification for ridiculous behaviors and situations. Then again, it's a story about how easily people condemn others for actions that are, at worst, innocent violations of arcane rules and often simply attempts to express individuality or to state the obvious. As you can see from these many ways of looking at it, this is grist for discussion in a philosophy or literature class. It's wordy and and long winded with many different potential interpretations of almost every scene. It raises a lot more questions than it answers, especially since it was unfinished (although the narrator does tell us how the author intended to end it).

The Castle tells the story of a man known simply as K. who arrives in a village to work as a surveyor at the invitation of the authorities in the town's castle, only to discover that there has been some kind of mix up and no surveyor is needed. It follows his attempts to deal with the castle's bureaucracy to receive justice or at least some kind of work (though he never manages to actually meet any of the major officials, but only communicates with them through a couple of apparently useless messages) and the village's residents, who are used to life under the castle's arbitrary rule and have little sympathy for K.'s troubles.

The Castle is probably my least favorite of Kafka's major unfinished works, perhaps in part because it seems to be the most unfinished of them. It is similar to The Trial in some ways, but also different in some interesting respects. While the story in The Trial involved endless, mind-numbing bureaucracy with regard to one particular aspect of life, namely the legal system, in the world of The Castle that bureaucracy is expanded to encompass ALL aspects of life, such that life itself becomes unlivable even if one is not accused of any wrongdoing. So The Castle is rather broader, but thus loses the focus of a work like The Trial (on the issue of guilt, in that case)...and that broadness seems to have fomented Kafka's tendency toward vagueness.

The Castle also feels somewhat rambling---there are some amusing or thought-provoking parts, but in general it just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. That's kind of the point, of course, but after a while it just starts to drag. It didn't seem that well-written for Kafka either, but I don't know how much of that is due to Mark Harman's translation of this edition and how much to the rough state of Kafka's original drafts.

On the whole, worth reading perhaps once, but some of Kafka's other work is better. Two and a half stars.

Long and... infuriating?

One begins to understand that the author, in order to make you understand the plight of his protagonist, intends to bring you both to a place of exhaustion. Had I known it was unfinished, I probably would never have begun the book, but, even incomplete, one gets the idea. 400 or so pages and you see clearly that the author could have gone on for another 400 in order to get his point across.

It would be too simple to say Kafka's lesson is that bureaucracy is dehumanizing, or the futility of continuing effort in the face of the absurd. I would argue that most of the villager's fears of rules, or of the castle, exist only in their head. Time and time again it is shown that a certain thing must be done not because the castle decrees it, but because the social order of the village peasants requires it.

Thus, while we see the bureaucracy is indeed absurd, it is made that way not from above, but from below, and the real enemy in this book are the social conventions and standards of propriety among the common people. Which is quite a good theme, but this book is just too long and exhausting and unpolished to do it justice.

The Trial by Franz Kafka.
Much has been written about this book. Many opinions seem to be rife about the meaning and the basic allegory of the plot and the story.
Kafka came from a German-speaking Jewish family and lived in Prague in Bohemia.He had a background of working in a job described by his father as a `breadjob' meaning he was just earning money with no career.He worked for an insurance company where he dealt with worker's injury claims, although he had a doctorate in law. He had a five-year attachment to Felice Bauer and although it consisted only of a number of meetings and a great deal of correspondence, they were engaged several times, each time breaking it off until their relationship finally failed in1917.

Kafka completed `The Trial' in 1915, though it was unfinished and later required editing by Max Brod his close friend. It has been studied and many opinions exist of its meaning. Kafka's dying wish was that Brod should burn the manuscript, but happily, he didn't.
There seem to be several interpretations. On the one hand,the story is supposed by some to be the depiction of the futility of struggling against fate or God. Others suppose it represents Kafka as a Jew in a society where Jews were condemned openly or behind the scenes, since anti-Semitism was rife in Europe even before the First World War.

The book begins with an `arrest'. The central character, `K' (is it coincidence that he has the author's initial and all other characters have spelled-out names?), a man aged thirty who works in a bank is confronted by two men who claim he is under arrest, but free to work and move around, but that a trial will commence to determine his future.
In the following story, K becomes acquainted with a number of characters who lead him in a fanciful dance designed to indicate the futility of his attempts to battle the `Courts'. It turns out almost everyone he encounters has been or is involved with the courts and even his family know he has a forthcoming trial without his communication with them. Everyone knows he is subject to `The Process' but even K never discovers what it is he is supposed to have done. I won't spoil the ending but I think it is symbolic not real. He meets various people who claim to be able to circumvent the outcome of the court and its decision, but he is at times enraged by it all and at other times passive, resisting any help whoever it is offered by. In the end, his fate is the reward he reaps by his intransigence and his resistance to taking advice.

My own feeling about the book is that it is not as simply asseeing it as written with one message. I think there are layers of allegory. On the one hand, one could interpret it as showing how society treats minorities.There is a veiled condemnation and of the individual which is unfathomable at first, subtle and hidden, but eventually becoming frank and obvious. A Jew living in Eastern Europe might well feel that was so.
Another layer is the futility of fighting against Society's opinions. Everyone is part of a social society and whomever you talk to they are part of it and that is revealed repeatedly in the book. K finds that even places he never identified as part of his trial are part of the courtrooms and court process. He doesn't trust his lawyer - OK, he has common sense!
Yet another portrayal of the author's underlying theme requires one to see how he might have viewed society's opinion of his relationship with Felice. It was off-on. It consisted of a lot of correspondence and few `in the flesh' encounters. Could it be that The Trial mirrors his feeling about how society might have viewed his eventual refusal to lead a normal, married life? Was he ostracised as a result?
If one transgresses, society may condemn one. It might not be immediately apparent that some force is working in the background against you. The evolution of the antipathy may emerge with time and eventually result in the apex of condemnation by the very social world in which one lives. To be Jewish and to jilt someone publicly - might that not evoke feelings of guilt - even a feeling that society condemns one without any visible trial?
But in the end, what is K guilty of? Is he just guilty of digging his heels in against a manipulative, turgid system, designed to visitits hatred and injustice on anyone who chooses to be different or even be born different? He is guilty of underestimating the power of the hierarchy. He is guilty of ignorance of the very system that controls us. He is even guilty of passivity. It results in the eventual judgement where the book ends.

So, the verdict? My verdict?

This is a book that has made me think more than any other I have read since I was a teenager (the first time I read it). Recommend it? Well if you have tolerance for some boring parts and patience to reap the eventual reward of the book, then yes.Not for everyone. It's not an adventure book but as someone who works a as a tiny cog in a big machine it speaks to me as no other book does!

Classic Account of Alienation and Absurdity

Review of "The Castle" by Franz Kafka

This book made me into a Kafka admirer. He brings life to characters in otherwise drab situations and makes them seem very real. The reader feels the frustration, absurdity, the pettiness and the powerlessness in a personal way. You feel the haughtiness and aloofness of the Castle staff as if they were a part of your own community. You feel the pettiness and delusional gossip of the townspeople as if you were seeing it first hand. The story is riveting and the pace seems fast even when there is little action.

The story starts with the protagonist (identified only by his initial, K.) walking to what sounds like a routine surveying job. Soon he is frustrated by a very confusing series of obstacles. As the story develops the obstacles become more chaotic. K.'s original purpose in going to the castle is never fully elaborated and his motives seem lost or stolen. The forces acting upon K. are shrouded. It seems as if some invisible force has plotted to test K. to the limit of human endurance of tolerance of ambiguity.

Kafka combines the themes of:
social class commentary,
alienation from a heartless social system,
absence of any protective power,
salvation,
redemption,
fear of strangers,
fear of change,
search for the meaning of life,
inscrutability of authorities,
indifference of forces ruling human fate,
persistence in the face lost purpose,
abuse of power
and
acceptance of pointlessness goals.

As the plot progresses it takes on a surreal nightmare quality. Is the protagonist having a nightmare, going insane or confronting the reality of his situation?

There is no end to the frustration. We are never told if K. is having a nightmare or going insane. We never discover why K. is so determined to enter the castle that he would tolerate and even join in to the absurdity. His original purpose of doing a surveying job could never justify his struggle to gain admittance. We are left seeing K. as a perpetual outsider. Perhaps Kafka is telling us that there is no end or limit to frustration, alienation and absurdity. Those seeking an answer to the ageless enigma of existence will never find a simple resolution.

This is a disturbing work that challenges conventional notions of plot and character development while testing the readers conception of his/her purpose in life. The Castle will confront the reader in unexpected ways and raise emotional personal issues that would otherwise be repressed.

See:

The Metamorphosis

The Trial

Amerika

Collections:

The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Classics Series)

Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)

The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

Blue Octavo Notebooks

Kafka's Selected Stories (Norton Critical Edition)

Give It Up: And Other Short Stories

Great German Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

I highly recommend this book.

This book can be read as an introduction to dystopian literature.
Joseph K.(the protagonist) arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle.
K. believes that he's been invited to a town to do some land surveying, and realise upon his arrival that his invitation was maybe the result of a bureaucratic mishap. K. wants answers from the officials at the castle that overlooks the town.
This book is about bureaucracy, meaning, connection, relationships, and how hierarchy impacts the way we experience and live in this world.
It may be unfinished, but it is an amazing book that can test your conception of the real purpose in your life.

I read The Trial several years ago, and I remember that I struggled with it and did not enjoy it nearly as much as I enjoyed Kafka's short works. So it was with some trepidation that I gave Kafka's novels another chance with The Castle.

Happily, I found it surprisingly absorbing. The Castle begins as if in a dream. K. wanders into a village on a cold winter`s evening, seeking a room for the night. He is quickly told that the authorities at the Castle do not allow strangers to pass the night. K. responds that he was summoned by the Castle; he is the new land surveyor. Is this true? Is it merely a ruse K. invents to secure shelter for the night? It does not matter. As in a dream, what K. says becomes, at least to K. himself, immediately true. Furthermore, taking up his position as land surveyor becomes a matter of prime importance and urgency. Yet he of course immediately encounters the chief problem of the Kafkaesque universe -- to reach the Castle he must navigate a system of rules that is as incomprehensible and senseless as it is uncompromising.

In the years since I last read Kafka, I had forgotten how bitingly funny he can be. The Castle is rich with satire and even slapstick-style comedy. Although this is often cited as an autobiographical work, Kafka allows little sympathy for his bewildered land surveyor. K.'s constant scheming, manipulations, and obsessive behavior are portrayed as ironically absurd and pathetic. Only in rare reflective moments could I feel the full impact of the tragedy of K.'s situation: that of the tenacious seeker left eternally in a dark, cold courtyard, hopefully waiting for an encounter that will never come.

This is not to say that I never found The Castle challenging to read. Kafka not only writes in long sentences, but he also writes paragraphs that can extend for many pages without a break. The tiresomeness and frustration of reading this style might add to the atmosphere of the novel, but it also makes voluntarily sticking with the book something of a test of will. The chore is not relieved by Kafka's plain, unexciting prose and tendency to ramble. In the end though, I was glad that I finally took the time to read this funny, frustrating, and ultimately sad work, and I am sorry that Kafka never finished it. This is not an easy read or terribly exciting plot-wise, but if you enjoy imaginative, absurdist situations and colorful characters The Castle is highly recommended.

"The Castle," though still an unfinished novel at his death, is Kafka's lengthiest and most well-developed novel. The crux of the storyline is a land surveyor, only referred to as "K.", and his gloriously futile efforts to gain knowledge of what exactly he is to be doing in the village. For, the village and everyone in it belongs to the Castle, an aged and unimpressive conglomeration of buildings and fortifications on a hill overlooking the village below. Yet, the Castle is not only a place, but a "state of mind", a state where incessant but enigmatic regulations and procedures saddle the village and its inhabitants with an insurmountable mountain of files, papers, and utter absurdity. For nothing can be accomplished without navigating the tangled and unfathomable labyrinth of rules and regulations of the Castle. Yet, its officials are inaccessible. Indeed, even the shortest contact with the lowliest of officials is almost unheard of, and even if this can be accomplished, nothing ever comes out of it.

The Castle enforces its power and influence over all of the village's inhabitants. Even a threat of action against a citizen is enough to persuade the entire community to ostracize its own. One can waste years of an otherwise productive life to try to prove false an allegation, yet because there was no formal report or deposition taken, there can be no action taken to rectify the situation. Yet, because the situation cannot be rectified, the victim remains in an incessant state of limbo, while the very essence of life is slowly drained out. Indeed, the indefatigable torment of the Castle and its regulations render an entire population impotent and at the mercy of its myriad of officials.

Anyone who has read "The Trial," may find some common themes. In fact, "The Castle" is in many ways similar to "The Trial." Both novels have the same recurring circular logic and logical fallacies that comprise their legal systems. Both engage in influence peddling with little effect. Both have the same protagonist - "K" - who unexpectedly enters a parallel world of which he knows nothing and can gain little knowledge. However, "The Castle" is more developed and less ominous and foreboding than "The Trial." Of course, there is no conclusion or climax in "The Castle", as "K." is left in perpetual limbo. Indeed, in the new Shocken translation, the book ends in mid-sentence, as if the pen had floated off the paper and disappeared.

This novel isn't for everyone. For first-time Kafka readers, I would recommend "The Trial" over "The Castle," as it is more poignant and definitive in its conclusion. Perhaps that this book is left unfinished will disturb some readers. Honestly, though, it is fitting that this novel ends in mid-sentence, as it seems as if there will never be a conclusion to "K's" plight. Also, this novel lacks punctuation and most sentences are rambling on without periods and paragraphs, so reading it can become tedious at times.

However, for Kafka fans, this book will be a must-read, as there are few ...

Just what is the castle? Is it simply (as commonly believed) a symbol of the pervasive bureaucracy everyone gets inured to in civilized society? Is there a religious connotation as Kafka's editor and friend Max Brod believed? Does it represent God, salvation, or a spiritual truth the agnostic subconsciously strives for in an outwardly unfathomable existence? Can it represent the futile, or hopeless acceptance that the "outsider" seeks in a generally indifferent and frequently hostile world? Is it any, or all of the above, or something entirely different?

In much of his work, Kafka poses questions that have no pat answers. He is simultaneously the most alien, and the most human of all authors. The protagonists of his novels and short stories each have part of their darkly brilliant but troubled creator within them, but the psyche of each living being inhabits them as well. All of us at times, peer out of the eyes of Gregor Samsa, Joseph K., or the frustrated land surveyor of THE CASTLE, known simply as K. I think the key to understanding THE CASTLE is to understand the primacy of the individual, and of his or her personal, subjective thoughts, actions, and responsibilities, as opposed to those dictated by the collective and represented by incomprehensible rules, absurd procedures, and organizational hypocrisy.

Kafka's parable BEFORE THE LAW tells of a man who comes to a partially open gate through which he must pass to gain admittance to the Law, and meets a gatekeeper who won't let him pass. He is told to wait and maybe he will eventually be let through. He waits for years on end, at times trying to bribe the keeper, all to no avail. Finally as he is about to die, he asks why all this time no one else sought admittance, and is told that the gate was meant only for him and the gatekeeper then shuts it.

The above parable was included and expounded upon in Kafka's most famous novel THE TRIAL, but it has resonance for his unfinished novel THE CASTLE as well. We can substitute the Law for the Castle and come away with similar thoughts. Kafka searches in vain for an explanation..a reason..a meaning..to an outwardly incomprehensible existence, and comes away frustrated at every turn. K. keeps trying to reach the Castle, keeps looking for answers, while people around him just accept the absurdities only he seems to see. This failure in the continual search for reason in an unreasonable world can only lead to a kind of self realization..the recognition that all meaning is subjective. K. is doomed to fail, but we the readers, who look through his eyes, are the beneficiaries of the process. We must come to the conclusion that it is only what we think and do as individuals that has any meaning, or gives purpose to life. To Albert Camus, THE CASTLE is fundamentally an existentialist novel. Kafka gave up on finishing THE CASTLE, and even had he survived the disease that ultimately lead to his death, it would have remained unfinished. Just as well that the writer who refused to supply easy answers, or come to simplistic conclusions, in this case did likewise with the ending.

I read The Trial several years ago, and I remember that I struggled with it and did not enjoy it nearly as much as I enjoyed Kafka's short works. So it was with some trepidation that I gave Kafka's novels another chance with The Castle.

Happily, I found it surprisingly absorbing. The Castle begins as if in a dream. K. wanders into a village on a cold winter`s evening, seeking a room for the night. He is quickly told that the authorities at the Castle do not allow strangers to pass the night. K. responds that he was summoned by the Castle; he is the new land surveyor. Is this true? Is it merely a ruse K. invents to secure shelter for the night? It does not matter. As in a dream, what K. says becomes, at least to K. himself, immediately true. Furthermore, taking up his position as land surveyor becomes a matter of prime importance and urgency. Yet he of course immediately encounters the chief problem of the Kafkaesque universe -- to reach the Castle he must navigate a system of rules that is as incomprehensible and senseless as it is uncompromising.

In the years since I last read Kafka, I had forgotten how bitingly funny he can be. The Castle is rich with satire and even slapstick-style comedy. Although this is often cited as an autobiographical work, Kafka allows little sympathy for his bewildered land surveyor. K.'s constant scheming, manipulations, and obsessive behavior are portrayed as ironically absurd and pathetic. Only in rare reflective moments could I feel the full impact of the tragedy of K.'s situation: that of the tenacious seeker left eternally in a dark, cold courtyard, hopefully waiting for an encounter that will never come.

This is not to say that I never found The Castle challenging to read. Kafka not only writes in long sentences, but he also writes paragraphs that can extend for many pages without a break. The tiresomeness and frustration of reading this style might add to the atmosphere of the novel, but it also makes voluntarily sticking with the book something of a test of will. The chore is not relieved by Kafka's plain, unexciting prose and tendency to ramble. In the end though, I was glad that I finally took the time to read this funny, frustrating, and ultimately sad work, and I am sorry that Kafka never finished it. This is not an easy read or terribly exciting plot-wise, but if you enjoy imaginative, absurdist situations and colorful characters The Castle is highly recommended.

"The Castle," though still an unfinished novel at his death, is Kafka's lengthiest and most well-developed novel. The crux of the storyline is a land surveyor, only referred to as "K.", and his gloriously futile efforts to gain knowledge of what exactly he is to be doing in the village. For, the village and everyone in it belongs to the Castle, an aged and unimpressive conglomeration of buildings and fortifications on a hill overlooking the village below. Yet, the Castle is not only a place, but a "state of mind", a state where incessant but enigmatic regulations and procedures saddle the village and its inhabitants with an insurmountable mountain of files, papers, and utter absurdity. For nothing can be accomplished without navigating the tangled and unfathomable labyrinth of rules and regulations of the Castle. Yet, its officials are inaccessible. Indeed, even the shortest contact with the lowliest of officials is almost unheard of, and even if this can be accomplished, nothing ever comes out of it.

The Castle enforces its power and influence over all of the village's inhabitants. Even a threat of action against a citizen is enough to persuade the entire community to ostracize its own. One can waste years of an otherwise productive life to try to prove false an allegation, yet because there was no formal report or deposition taken, there can be no action taken to rectify the situation. Yet, because the situation cannot be rectified, the victim remains in an incessant state of limbo, while the very essence of life is slowly drained out. Indeed, the indefatigable torment of the Castle and its regulations render an entire population impotent and at the mercy of its myriad of officials.

Anyone who has read "The Trial," may find some common themes. In fact, "The Castle" is in many ways similar to "The Trial." Both novels have the same recurring circular logic and logical fallacies that comprise their legal systems. Both engage in influence peddling with little effect. Both have the same protagonist - "K" - who unexpectedly enters a parallel world of which he knows nothing and can gain little knowledge. However, "The Castle" is more developed and less ominous and foreboding than "The Trial." Of course, there is no conclusion or climax in "The Castle", as "K." is left in perpetual limbo. Indeed, in the new Shocken translation, the book ends in mid-sentence, as if the pen had floated off the paper and disappeared.

This novel isn't for everyone. For first-time Kafka readers, I would recommend "The Trial" over "The Castle," as it is more poignant and definitive in its conclusion. Perhaps that this book is left unfinished will disturb some readers. Honestly, though, it is fitting that this novel ends in mid-sentence, as it seems as if there will never be a conclusion to "K's" plight. Also, this novel lacks punctuation and most sentences are rambling on without periods and paragraphs, so reading it can become tedious at times.

However, for Kafka fans, this book will be a must-read, as there are few ...

Just what is the castle? Is it simply (as commonly believed) a symbol of the pervasive bureaucracy everyone gets inured to in civilized society? Is there a religious connotation as Kafka's editor and friend Max Brod believed? Does it represent God, salvation, or a spiritual truth the agnostic subconsciously strives for in an outwardly unfathomable existence? Can it represent the futile, or hopeless acceptance that the "outsider" seeks in a generally indifferent and frequently hostile world? Is it any, or all of the above, or something entirely different?

In much of his work, Kafka poses questions that have no pat answers. He is simultaneously the most alien, and the most human of all authors. The protagonists of his novels and short stories each have part of their darkly brilliant but troubled creator within them, but the psyche of each living being inhabits them as well. All of us at times, peer out of the eyes of Gregor Samsa, Joseph K., or the frustrated land surveyor of THE CASTLE, known simply as K. I think the key to understanding THE CASTLE is to understand the primacy of the individual, and of his or her personal, subjective thoughts, actions, and responsibilities, as opposed to those dictated by the collective and represented by incomprehensible rules, absurd procedures, and organizational hypocrisy.

Kafka's parable BEFORE THE LAW tells of a man who comes to a partially open gate through which he must pass to gain admittance to the Law, and meets a gatekeeper who won't let him pass. He is told to wait and maybe he will eventually be let through. He waits for years on end, at times trying to bribe the keeper, all to no avail. Finally as he is about to die, he asks why all this time no one else sought admittance, and is told that the gate was meant only for him and the gatekeeper then shuts it.

The above parable was included and expounded upon in Kafka's most famous novel THE TRIAL, but it has resonance for his unfinished novel THE CASTLE as well. We can substitute the Law for the Castle and come away with similar thoughts. Kafka searches in vain for an explanation..a reason..a meaning..to an outwardly incomprehensible existence, and comes away frustrated at every turn. K. keeps trying to reach the Castle, keeps looking for answers, while people around him just accept the absurdities only he seems to see. This failure in the continual search for reason in an unreasonable world can only lead to a kind of self realization..the recognition that all meaning is subjective. K. is doomed to fail, but we the readers, who look through his eyes, are the beneficiaries of the process. We must come to the conclusion that it is only what we think and do as individuals that has any meaning, or gives purpose to life. To Albert Camus, THE CASTLE is fundamentally an existentialist novel. Kafka gave up on finishing THE CASTLE, and even had he survived the disease that ultimately lead to his death, it would have remained unfinished. Just as well that the writer who refused to supply easy answers, or come to simplistic conclusions, in this case did likewise with the ending.

Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. He was a Jew living in Prague and working for the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He wrote in his spare time and was inspired by the problems associated with bureaucratic institutions - such as we read in "The Castle."

I read all of Kafka's work and am putting together a Listmania list from my notes and experiences. His short novella "Metamorphosis" is among the best short works ever written. Unfortunately, he did not write and publish much when he was alive. Most of what is available was published after his early death, and some of it is edited (possibly) poorly as in "Amerika." His writings vary from novels to one page impressions of life, such as one essay that is about looking out a window. The novels revolve around a young to middle aged protagonist male named "K," who battles the courts and bureaucrats.

"The Trial" is an unfinished novel. It is similar in idea to "The Castle," but it is much more intense, since it involves a life and death situation. It reaches its maximum intensity in the last few complex chapters where K visits a Cathedral. There K meets a Priest who relates a parable to K that explains his own situation. The novel has a complex and unfinished ending.

The novel is good but the reader is left with the same question as with the other English translations: will we ever understand all of his writings as English readers? Are there points here that we will miss because of the translation to English? I found this quotation that makes that point (from Wikipedia):

"Kafka often made extensive use of a trait special to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the period--that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are not duplicable in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text."

In any case, this is not as good as "Metamorphosis," and few would expect that it could be, but still it is excellent and is more complex than "The Castle."

Franz Kafka is rightly regarded as one of the great writers of the 20th century. His relatively few works have been reviewed and studied ad infinitum, so it may seem rather pointless for me to write yet another review.

But I must confess to a personal bias: Kafka is one of the handful of writers that I can read over and over again, especially his shorter stories. His novels, such as The Castle, are harder going. Complex sentences make the reader focus on the words and the meaning of phrases. It is a bit like savouring the flavours and textures of a delicious meal - not like Homer Simpson wolfing down his food.

The Castle was unfinished when Kafka died. The first edition published in 1927 was finished by the editor based on prior discussions with Kafka.

"K," the principal character in the book, arrives as a stranger in the village below the Castle to take up an official position as Land Surveyor for the region. But he faces an illogical sequence of events and fearful uncertainty, pushed and pulled by the mysterious, all-powerful officials in the Castle that prevent him from either knowing his duties or even taking them up. He never gets to meet the officials who appointed him, but even his contacts with their subordinates is through ambiguous intermediaries.

Moreover, as a stranger in the village, K also faces the petty enmities and opposition of the villagers that increase his isolation and provide a sub-text to the main themes - or, as K would say - is it actually the main theme? These kinds of contradictions recur frequently throughout the narrative.

On a more fundamental level the story is one of human isolation, of man's quest for freedom and validation. That is the uplifting part. But there is a deep pessimism in the book as well. Everything that K attempts seems to fail. The mysterious Castle seems to emerge triumphant in every encounter.

The world has changed immensely since "The Castle" was written early in the 20th century. But Kafka deals with themes that are still with us - and which, in fact, may have become more relevant today.

Governments and bureaucracies still oppress the powerless. Life is still subject to the caprices of fate and officialdom that form central themes in this book. We still encounter pettiness as well as nobility of humanity in our individual lives.

It is not so much the broad story line that fascinates me in this book (although the reader does want to know the ultimate fate of K), but rather the flow of words and the imagery that they conjure up as one reads. In fact, you can enjoy short passages almost as stand-alone stories.

The Castle is a deeply provocative book for readers who care to reflect on the universalities of the human condition and the universalities of bureaucratic desires to control the citizenry.

The Trial isn't a law story like something by John Grisham.

In a way, it's not really like any story except maybe other works by Franz Kafka himself.

That's because this book is like one of those paintings with a bunch of dots where you need to get in the right position to see the picture...except that the picture you see when you read The Trial is more about what you expect to see than anything else. It's kind of like a written Rites of Spring by Stravinsky where you can focus in on what you will.

In that way, what you see is what you get in this book, with each person seeing something different.

So, if no view is objectively right, then what did I see?

I think The Trial was a metaphor for "the trials" of life itself, which challenge, stress and ultimately wear us out. In that way, "Defendant" Joseph K's all too arbitrary movements were all also all to familiar.

If my slant on this book is different from yours, then maybe that's the point. Maybe Kafka wanted to inspire individual responses and thereby make his book more relevant to each reader.

On Trial is Josef K. a respected banker in an unnamed city. He faces charges that are never explained to him and about which he gains little information. He vainly tries to mount a defense, much to the detriment of his work, using the few resources available to him and his family. Along the way he alienates some who might further help him and ultimately ends up trying to fight the charges alone. The trial coupled with his work exhaust Josef K. and by the end of the book does not protest his final sentence. Throughout the novel the reader comes to the conclusion that the trial itself is not for any specific thing Josef K. has done but rather his fitness a human being. In essence he is on trial for how well he may be able to mount a defense. When first faced with the charges Josef K. is defiant and confident of acquittal but over a period of time he comes to accept his fate. This is well illustrated in the climax of the novel in which Kafka presents a parable to explain Josef K.'s situation. Kafka thoroughly convinces the reader of exactly what they have to fear.

I want to stress there are many ways to interpret this book. Whether as a commentary on justice or an existentialist parable Kafka has much to offer the reader. I would implore anyone who is considering reading Kafka to pick up this novel it is well worth a read.

Resistance to reading Kafka's most emblematic unfinished novel was largely the result of a suspicion on my part of any novelist who wilfully betrayed a reader's understandable desire to know what's Really Going On. If frustration were to be the only reward for having committed to reading the novel, then I didn't wish to join the Kafka reading club. Added to what was my suspicion of committing to an already clearly-stated intent to deceive was the fact that the novel is termed `unfinished'. So not only was Kafka determined from the outset to not allow his reader to rest on any easy ground of recognition, he also had the temerity to further undermine any desire to interpret by refusing to `finish' his novel. Oy vey! For over thirty years I've wanted nothing to do with him.

I'm not proud of this stance; and to rectify matters I put aside my childish need for certitudes and I purchased a copy of the new translation of The Trial. I'm very glad that I did. It's a difficult novel to pin down and this may be why it has had such an enduring hold on our imaginations over the decades. Kafka's refusal to clearly articulate the subject matter of his novel places the reader in the same position as Josef K. The reader and the hero become one. This results in an almost compulsive desire on the part of the reader to find out what's going on; but where the one-to-one mapping breaks down is that Josef K. at many points in the novel won't ask obvious questions - questions that a reader would deem essential. He confounds his own need to know. Or perhaps it might be more productive to say that he betrays his need to know. If Knowledge is Power then Josef K. is the ultimate Helpless Man. As indeed are all the characters in the novel. Those on the `inside' of the Law are perfectly explicit in positing a hierarchy of Knowledge to which they have no access. They too are in some senses powerless. They cannot act in any other way. They are bound to the Guilty as the Guilty are bound to their `crimes'.

The interpretive compulsion goes into high gear on reading The Trial and this is why so much has been allowed to be read `into' the novel. It's about Bureaucracy (in some Weberian way)! It's about Totalitarianism! It's about Existentialism! Is it? I honestly don't know. I do know that it's about a very ordinary, bourgeois man caught in a system that may very well be of his own making. How so? Because his route to redemption is travelled on the path of acceptance. He walks willingly, obligingly to his sacrificial death much as Isaac allowed himself to be placed on the altar by Abraham. Echoes of Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith abound. Submission to The Law is very much more than any legalistic Code. The Law is deeply religious in its presentation and symbolism in the novel.

One can't help speculating on Josef K's guilt. It resides, for me, in his refusal in the course of his life to acknowledge or contemplate anything outside himself. He is a very small, petty, self-contained man who's crime and subsequent guilt forces him to confront, acknowledge, come-to-know and forgive, The Other. It's a marvellous novel and I'm so very glad that I read it. Finally.

THE CASTLE by Franz Kafka (Hardcover Definitive Edition)
The Castle

I found it interesting to read the customer reviews of Kafka's "The Castle." It is obvious that there are no clear answers to what the book "means." Is it an analogy to modern, impersonal society; a condemnation of bureaucracy; a search for salvation; a quest for enlightenment over ignorance? The protagonist, "K", is a land-surveyor, purportedly retained by The Authorities to do some work. But what he is supposed to do is never made clear. He needs to meet with The Director, but somehow can never make contact with him. Along the way, he meets a number of characters --- The Mayor, The Barmaid, various assistants - all of whom present their view of reality. I can see The Castle as an existentialist play, perhaps by Pirandello or Brecht, or even Beckett. There is virtually no plot, and very little in the way of character development. The work ends in mid- sentence, suspended in time and space. The Castle itself is both a literal stone-and-mortar structure and a metaphor for impersonal authority...perhaps even a Dante-esque representation of hell.
It is probably helpful to consider "The Castle" in its historical and social context: the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and end of the Hapsburg Dynasty, and the threshold of World War. So "K" is Modern Man: alienated, alone, disaffected, consumed with angst and ennui.

So... someone wants to describe a fragmented, uncommunicative society and a Hellish bureaucracy... fine. But after a while, there is really not much happening here. While some aspects are slightly surreal, there's not enough of that to be fantastical or symbolic, and certainly there's not enough plot to propel a story of any interest based in reality. Eventually, you have to really ask yourself why not move on to something with a bit more point to it... or something more interesting in its pointlessness? Why go down this rabbit hole of red-herrings that never deliver fruit... to mix a bunch of metaphors.

When KafKa died, this novel, on which he had already stopped working for a few years, was left unfinished. It actually ends in mid-sentence!

The reader is told nothing of the internal thoughts of the protagonists, of their real motivations and objectives. There is no resolution to the multiple questions that arise from the plot. In fact, as the same events are often reported very differently by various characters, the reader is led to ponder about the relativity of truth.

Though challenging in its substance, this novel is easy to grasp and fully enjoyable.

It is strongly recommended to all who enjoy modernity.

Those like myself who seldom read fiction but enjoy looking at the world through different lenses may find the reading of this work rewarding. K's travails evoked memories of my time in the military (in Southeast Asia): nothing is as it appears, days of boredom are interrupted by moments of bewildering activity, people have whole menus of hidden agendae, one struggles to attain goals that later prove empty of significance, chance meetings turn out to have been pivotal, and apparently chance meetings turn out to have been carefully staged for one's benefit (or detriment!). K lives in a world very much like ours... where the puppetmasters are unknown strangers, and our companions turn out to be very unlike what they appear. If this novel has any practical value (heresy!) it is as a manual on techniques of 'how to navigate in the dark.' For those who doubt it, one can navigate in the dark, but one must use one's ears (distant sounds of crashing waves, the echoes of thunder, the direction of the seabreezes). The biggest obstacle to finding one's way is a full moon -- one can see the sea, but the stars (far more important!) disappear from view. ... All in all, I liked Kafka's book. As each of the characters around him reveal the reasons behind their bizarre behaviors, they become 'normal' humans, disappointing but less weird. K is in some ways a lightning rod, provoking his very upset neighbors into revealing the reasons for their anger and frustration with him. After awhile one doesn't even care any more about The Castle and its occupants; the village is more real and surviving in it is a lot more important than escaping from it.

To me, this is the quintessential Kafka book. This book has it all: subtle touches of surreal realism, Kafka's hallmark bureaucratic ramblings, bizarre situational comedy, and strong characters that are apt to suddenly burst and reveal depths of their psyche you could've never imagined.

All in all, the story simply describes all the things an adult has to deal with in their day-to-day life. It's just that everything is intensified and everything is amassed on top of each other, like some horrible nightmare of a hundred minor inconveniences.
Commonly, the protagonist in the Castle will find himself
A) madly in love, but beginning to drift away from his lover, or even desperately trying to hold on to their fleeting love
B) having to earn his living, doing a job that just sucks
C) finding a place to live
D) trying to find his way through a nightmarish buraeucratic maze
E) and also he is cold, hungry, and he never seems to be able to get a good night's rest
all at once, in one of the many, many brilliantly orchestrated scenes of The Castle that you just can't help but awe at.

But at the same time, there is a strange mystical quality to the world of The Castle. Kafka always manages to explain--nay, *illuminate*--the bureaucratic procedures of his horrifyingly familiar worlds with such astonishing detail and sober clarity, but The Castle goes even beyond that. Here, the bureaucratic process almost seems fantastical, the bureaucrats wielders of terrible magic, and yet it all always remains true to reality.

The quintessential Kafka book, and a highly entertaining read at that, too. Especially recommended to those who are just starting to find their way into adulthood, that is, those starting to have to fend for themselves and deal with the bureaucratic system.

This edition of Kafka's monumental 'The Castle' reproduces the left over fragments and deleted sequences that Max Brod produced after Kafka's death. It marks the most complete presentation of this great work since its original release. 'The Castle' contains Kafka's most haunting and wonderful qualities: a nightmarish psychological intensity paired with a satirical slaying of modernity. It involves a man named K who is commissioned as a 'Land Surveyor' at a Castle who must make his way without friends or allies. As he proceeds, he is thrust into an irrational universe of arbitrary rules and punishments, where there is both a callous indifference to the needs of man and a pious respect of absurdity and authority. Kafka was perhaps the most successful writer to represent the metaphysical and psychological darkness of our era through an investigation of the material world. His genius is both nuanced and expansive. Do not miss this supreme masterpiece.

This novel starts at the arrival of an engineer called K at a village. Despite his assertion, no one can confirm his contract with the Castle. Then, K decides the direct negotiation with it, although he doesn't know where the Castle is. This absurd beginning of the story suggests the atmosphere of this novel. Every trial to go to the Castle fails though it is visible from the village. Every effort is felt meaningless to access here, because no one knows the way to it. No people except a woman help him with interest. The woman becomes his lover, but soon leaves him. At last he succeeds to meet the attorney of the Castle, but there is little hope. His trial to contact the Castle continues without any disappointment...
The above is a rough sketch of this novel. We notice that the important is not the story, but the process of his behavior. He feels little emotion against his lover at the village. He has little pleasure even when the attorney of the Castle says to research the existence of his contract. He feels as if it is natural when his lover betrays him. His aim is to keep the contract with the Castle and only that. Making no human relations with village people, he is going to perform his obligation to the Castle with the strict will, although it doesn't give him any assurance of the existence of the contract.
The theme of this novel is his highly rational and little emotional behavior in this absurd situation that symbolizes our society. His psychology is only the adaptation to it. The story ends abruptly without any conclusion like our lives. We have no lessons from this novel, but only experience the lonely soul in the absurd world.
We must admit that this experience is suitable for some situation. This novel will bring the supreme sympathy to those who is replaced on the same environment.

A man named Josef K. (often just referred to as K., short for Kafka perhaps?) is arrested for reasons never explained to him (or the reader, for that matter), but still allowed to live a normal (?) life. Not only is his crime never explained, but the authority by which the arrest took place is never given. The title of the book is ironic, because there never is an actual "trial". He is told to report the following Sunday, but never given the specific time or place, and when he finds the location (a very unlikely location, in a huge, labyrinthine tenement) K. is informed that he is late, and nothing is resolved. During the course of the book, it seems like almost everyone he meets is connected with the court in some way (even the annoying young girls that bother him on his way to see the court painter), but even the influential people are unable to exert their influence in any meaningful way. The ending of the novel is somewhat shocking, but not really surprising.
Josef K. represents much of humankind in general. Most of us have that vague feeling that we have done something wrong but actually cannot pinpoint what it is. There is a general feeling of guilt from what theologians might call "Original Sin". The trial to which K. is subjected takes place in his very soul. Franz Kafka was not a religious man, but he knew that universal feeling of guilt, and, in my amateur opinion, "The Trial" was Kafka's way of expounding on that guilt. Of course, that is only one level of meaning one could gain from this novel. The fact that the book works at so many levels is why many consider it a classic. It's not the best book ever written, but it is certainly not a waste of time, especially to those who take time to compehend Kafka's nightmarish vision.

Judging from the commentaries on here, this is a book one either "gets" or "doesn't get"... I'm startled that several reviewers didn't consider K an interesting character; I always thought he was the best of Kafka's alter-egos--vain, short-tempered, tirelessly calculating, yet endearingly scrappy.
It is important to stress that this novel was put together posthumously from Kafka's chaotic notes, and that there were numerous unresolved plot threads that had to be sorted through; thus the book in it's present state is essentially just an editor's "best guess" at what decisions Kafka might've made if he had finished it himself. In Max Brod's version, an appendix was included with the alternate possibilities that Kafka had written at various points in the narrative. This was a wise decision-- it essentially preserved the work as the author had left it, and it also added to the amorphous, disoriented feeling of the book. Reading that version while referring to the appendix is much like accompanying Kafka through the labyrinthine process of creating his unwieldy epic.
Part of the charm of Kafka is in the sincere amateurishness of his work. He seems bored by the mechanics of constructing a tidy, coherent plot; he easily gets sidetracked and lost in his own wildly inspired creations. He abandons his work in the way a bewildered child will abruptly walk away from an unresolved, too-ambitious crayon masterpiece. In this version, although the translator went to great pains to preserve the feeling of Kafka's language, he unfortunately left out these important notes, thus turning this strange, unique book into a more conventional novel.

I read somewhere that Kafka used to read the newly-written chapters of THE CASTLE to his friends who would laugh uproariously along with the author. I found this the scariest thing about the book, indeed one of the strongest clues that late 20th century America is immeasurably distant from early 20th century Austria-Hungary. This book will give you nightmares. It is nothing so childish as a Hollywood horror movie, but a somehow crumpled, twisted, horrifying view of human nature, especially as manifest in bureaucracies. K needs to speak to someone to get something done. He approaches the castle where the lord lives. The whole story involves his endless efforts to speak to someone, anyone, who can help him contact the servant who has the ear of the clerk who can speak to the courtier who might be able to talk to the cousin who occasionally is known to have the ear of the lord. And of course, K is continually frustrated. Not to mention you, the reader. It is the stuff of the worst nightmares. Thus, though it is extremely unpleasant,without any hint of beauty, love, or human feeling, THE CASTLE is a most powerful novel, one of the best I have ever read. I can't say I liked it, but it impressed me no end. If you have ever read anything else by Kafka and liked it, you will definitely like this one. It was never finished, but then such a novel can have no finish.

Well, I've just finished reading The Trial for the sixth, maybe even eighth time, and as usual my brain is buzzing with all the unanswered questions and unspoken quandaries that this book embeds in the reader's mind.
An aside - this is the first time I have read this particular translation, having read the Muir's work before. Perhaps this translation is a bit livelier, and the chapters, or sequences, are grouped a bit differently, but the general experience of reading and digesting this book was much the same as with the Muir's version. One caution, if you are a first time reader do not read the introduction first. The author gives away much too much of the story and ending in the introduction.
Now, back to the book itself. As "they" say, the mark of a true classic is that you can reread the book several times and always find it fresh. This is most certainly the case with The Trial. I always struggle with the question of K.'s innocence. The reader is told, unequivocally, that the Law is attracted to guilt. Is this an illustration of the unreasoning, monolithic madness that
so often surrounds totalitarian states, or is Kafka tellling
the reader indirectly that K. is guilty? I think most readers,
especially me, want to like and identify with the central
protagonist of a novel, but on this particular rereading
I noticed that K. is really a pretty nasty character. He is
arrogant beyond belief, selfish, treats women and most everyone
else as objects, and is even potentially violent. He alienates
and insults people who have the desire and the means to help him
navigate the formalities and uncertainties of his arrest and
trial. Or, is he an essentially decent fellow who, beset with
unrelenting frustration and anger at being accused and arrested
for a crime he didn't commit, decompensates into irrational
actions? Don't expect easy answers from Kafka. He is not going
to wrap everything up in a pretty bow, fully resolved, so that
you can feel good. It's a damned disturbing, sometimes bizarre,
and ultimately amazing novel. What is noteworthy is how
deceptively simple the construction of the plotline is. First,
the novel is short. Second, there are no parallel or
simultaneous plotlines occurring. There is only one plotline,
that of K. as he is initially arrested and subsequently tries to
make sense of what the charges are and how to deal with them. K.
is in every scene. There's no ,"meanwhile, back at the
courthouse, Inspector Smith was...". So the story, if this novel
can be said to contain a "story", moves along quite quickly.
Kafka's prose style is crisp and unadorned, as you might expect
from someone educated in business and law in early 1900's
Prague.And it's a good thing that he writes so clearly, because
the story itself contains not only some astonishingly bizarre
scenes (the flogging in the closet springs to mind) but dizzying
explanations of the procedures and logic of the court, the Law,
the judges, and lawyers. Imagine a writer like Tom Robbins, or
Don Delillo, with their hallucinogenic segues and refusal to bow
to consistency and logic, trying to pull off the "Lawyer"
or "Painter" sequences. It would be a soggy mess. But Kafka with
his precision and austerity makes it breathtaking.
It's funny, when my friends see me reading Kafka the initial response is almost always surprise and some variation of "Yuck!"
Of course, they haven't read him, but everyone "knows" that he is weird and dark and disturbed plus the book is old and doesn't probably even have a happy ending. Oh well, their loss.
I really want to take a class on Kafka, ideally focussing on the Trial. It is puzzling and unsettling and I'd love to hear other's thoughts on the symbolism and meaning contained in the book. In fact, if you're a Kafka scholar, or just someone who likes and has given some thought to this book, email me with your thoughts.
I unhesitatingly recommend this novel. It is important. It is certainly important to me.
ng

Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. He was a Jew living in Prague and working for the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He wrote in his spare time and was inspired by the problems associated with bureaucratic institutions - such as we read in "The Castle."

I read all of Kafka's work and am putting together a Listmania list from my notes and experiences. His short novella "Metamorphosis" is among the best short works ever written. Unfortunately, he did not write and publish much when he was alive. Most of what is available was published after his early death, and some of it is edited (possibly) poorly as in "Amerika." His writings vary from novels to one page impressions of life, such as one essay that is about looking out a window. The novels revolve around a young to middle aged protagonist male named "K," who battles the courts and bureaucrats.

"The Trial" is an unfinished novel. It is similar in idea to "The Castle," but it is much more intense, since it involves a life and death situation. It reaches its maximum intensity in the last few complex chapters where K visits a Cathedral. There K meets a Priest who relates a parable to K that explains his own situation. The novel has a complex and unfinished ending.

The novel is good but the reader is left with the same question as with the other English translations: will we ever understand all of his writings as English readers? Are there points here that we will miss because of the translation to English? I found this quotation that makes that point (from Wikipedia):

"Kafka often made extensive use of a trait special to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the period--that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are not duplicable in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text."

In any case, this is not as good as "Metamorphosis," and few would expect that it could be, but still it is excellent and is more complex than "The Castle."

Block, the painter, and Leni among others, are strangers who understand the complications of Joseph K's case as well as the details of court operations. The story exist in a state of total chaos, characters come and go for no clear reason, out of the blue, women go crazy over Joseph and then changing on him for no reason, People show concern for him and then become completely indifferent to his plight and an accusation , that he doesn't understand, is made. Joseph doesn't know if it's a crazy nightmare or reality.

The court that has access to any information or place at any time and holds the divine authority to decide everybody's destiny, still conducts its business in weird, dark and suspicious places. Is the court a symbol of the unaccountable bureaucracy that Kafka witnessed or was it the inner world of alienation that Kafka experienced all of his life? Was the first building that Joseph went to for the first court meeting merely a strange, empty, dark place or was it a maze that symbolizes a corrupt society?

When the prison chaplain comments: "...it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary", did he refer to the corrupted legal system or to the crazy world as Kafka saw it?

What does Fraulein Burstner symbolize in Joseph's life? What is the significance of her sudden vague appearance at the end? was she the last connection to life in Joseph's eyes?

Why didn't Joseph fight the two men at the end? Had he given up and wanted to end his emotional torment or was it his longing to discover the ultimate truth?

As is typical of Kafka's works, there are many unanswered questions, but the journey through his works is outstanding and complex. It isn't called Kafkaesque for nothing.

unlike critics who would say that this novel was never finished, I believe that Kafka finished this novel and made the characters and events as random and confusing as possible. Reading the Trial, another Kafka masterpiece, is certainly time well spent.

We enter a world which is not the one we are in. We stand before the gates of the City ,and as we are about to enter, new walls intervene and remind us that all the distance we have traveled has taken us farther away from our goal. We look around us for familiar faces and when we see a smile, the smile suddenly turns to be the grotesque laughing of an enemy stranger.We think we are where we are but we are not anywhere where we can tell what this is.

And through it all there is a haunting lure of darkness and distress, an atmosphere of Evil about to be done to us.

No one can enter Kafka's world unless they read of the long chains of prison within himself , and which give themselves names as his world.

The 'Castle ' is not a 'Castle' and the book is not a book. But once we enter them both we will not be able to get out without screaming that the world is far more horrible than we ever dreamed.

We will never get out even as we have never been able to enter.

"The Castle" is a typical work of Kafka. It features an enterprising, stubborn, white-collar protagonist facing insurmountable obstacles who lacks the introspection to see he is a playing a game he cannot win.
"The Castle" is about Joseph K., a Land Surveyor, who comes to the village under a reign of... well, not terror, perhaps bumbling indifference, by the imposing symbol of absurd beauracracy, The Castle. The Castle assigns inept assistants to Joseph, does not allow him to contact them, and worse yet, does not even give him a job, but tells him to "Keep up the good work."
Along the way, Joseph makes the acquaintance of a mysteriously shunned family, takes on a fiancee who may or may not be all that she appears, and encounters a menagerie of cryptic, esoteric characters -- all of whom have their own ideas about the Castle and its vague, shadowy inhabitants.
This is a pretty effective treatise on beauracracy and the frustration of the common person of working hard and getting ahead. But be forewarned: the ending is imminently unsatisfied. Also be certain to try and find a Max Brod translation if possible. The difference is very notable.

This is a marvelous romance with a mystery about a young American orphan, Isabel, who travels to France to find her birth Father.
This is no easy task, having never been acknowledged by her father, and her mother declining to name him. The only clue our heroine has, is her mother's postcard of his home, the Chateau Ferrancolles.
She travels to the Chateau under false pretenses. There her undeniable family resemblence causes some slight consternation amongst her shocked, suspicious relatives.
Isabel, longing for a father and a family, does her best with these cold, uninterested relatives and her supposed, newfound, distant father.
There are dark family secrets, nefarious relatives, cases of mistaken identity and finally a loving relationship for the heroine.
This is a very enjoyable novel with interesting, imperfect characters.
Recommended.

This version, like the original manuscript, ends mid-sentence. Kafka was dying of tuberculosis. An infection secondary to TB developed in his throat, making eating too painful for him, and he died of starvation at a sanatorium near Vienna. A lot of the negative reviews here refer to how unfinished the book seems, or how morbid and dreary. And even good reviews emphasize the bureaucracy primarily as a symbol of social conditions. Kafka, a Czech Jew living through WW I, who had symptoms of hypochondria before he contracted TB, (which was often fatal in those times) spent many years convalescing. He was unable to earn a living to support himself, and virtually unknown as a writer, and probably thinking of death a lot, and his inability to make a living, or stay healthy, or find meaning in his short life. I find this biographical background essential to appreciating the Castle. I understand the bureaucracy of the castle to be a metaphor for illness, as well as for society, and existential angst. Please don't let anyone you know read the book (or review it!) without knowing his background.

With its labyrinthine backdrop and its claustrophobic atmosphere, "The Castle" is, above all, a novel about frustration: irritation at ignorance, exasperation with complacency, and above all, annoyance with bureaucracy.

And it can be frustrating for readers, too. The book was unfinished; it ends mid-sentence; and the new Harman translation (which is the one I read) attempts to restore the book to its raw, unpunctuated state. Because its themes center on the mindlessness of officialdom and the repetitiveness of red tape, Kafka's portrayal can seem mindless and repetitive. (Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene where K. visits with Burgel, whose interminable monologue lulls K. to sleep. It worked like a charm on me, too, and I had to reread the chapter.)

Yet the book contains passages both memorable and quotable, characters that are recognizable, and mysteries (however unsolved) that can be fascinating. As a result, it's a book best read in small doses to appreciate both the author's dry (and even slapstick) humor and, even more, the work's satirical bite.

The plot, such as it is, can be summarized in a brief description. Called to work as a land surveyor for village, K. arrives only to discover that the request was a mistake, that none of the officials in the Castle will take responsibility for their mistake or meet with him to discuss it, and that the townsfolk neither know nor care what it is that the officials and their secretaries do. In short, nobody gets into the Castle. Instead, K. is given a job as a janitor in a school, falls in love with a barmaid, and attempts to meet with Klamm, the official who has allegedly been assigned to his "case."

The Castle's functionless bureaucrats cannot be said to impede K.'s quest; they are hardly seen during the course of his stay. K.'s frustration is amplified not by their active interference but rather by their negligence and obfuscation. The result is far worse, since K. can't even identify with whom he should be struggling or how he should proceed. The officials and their secretaries are so busy with their own paperwork and routines that they really don't have time to attend to anything else, least of all concern themselves with problems that have nothing to do with the nothing they themselves do.

"True, they say that all of us belong to the Castle," admits a young village woman named Olga, who sympathizes with K.'s pursuit and who describes how the Castle's insouciance destroyed her own family. "But where in all this do you see the influence of the Castle?" K. responds. "It doesn't seem to have intervened yet. What you have told me up to now is nothing more than the mindless timidity of the people." Not fully comprehending his own revelation, K. identifies that the problem lies not in the Castle; instead it lies without.

Not until 1982 had I formed a clear idea for the meaning of the term Òkafkaesque.Ó The revelation came when I found myself trapped in the middle of Prague, KafkaÕs hometown, on a crossroad that received one way lanes from every direction. It was real and surreal and frightening and comical, but nothing dreamy about it. I knew, if I tried to get myself out of this situation, there would inevitably be a very real cop just waiting to give me a very real ticket,. And he did. He was drunk and rather shabbily uniformed. For many years in my early teens, I had KafkaÕs ÔTrialÕ on my bedside table. If you want to learn German, this is the book for you. It comes in simple and straightforward language. Kafka was a great admirer of Flaubert and his maxim to tell extraordinary things in ordinary language. So whatever KafkaÕs translators may say, Kafka does not exactly pose a linguistic challenge. Still there are differences. The Muirs' translation, prior to MitchellÕs, is still a respectable piece of late Victorian imitation furniture. But Mitchell does improve, no doubt. However the actual order of the chapters in this unfinished novel is still open to questions -- MitchellÕs editors chose to be conservative. As it stands, the ÒTrialÓ is a great step forward from KafkaÕs first novel ÔAmerica!Õ which was written under the influence of Oliver Twist. It has many scenes of burning intensity and a sensual quality, Kafka himself never matched again. However the American backdrop is cut from cardboard and not very convincing. Kafka always had a problem to convey a sense of locality if it wasnÕt his hometown. Any reader of KafkaÕs ÒCastleÓ faces the same problem, the interiors come to life vividly enough, but the geography is curiously vague. The ÒTrialÕsÓ setting is Prague, and it shows. This is perhaps KafkaÕs most guilt-stricken story. From scene to scene the shadows thicken until Joseph K.Õs providential encounter in the mystical bleakness of the Cathedral. I refuse to speculate on the meaning in all of this, however I would advise against fetching too far for an interpretation. The language is straightforward but still loaded with little pointers and puns. For instance: the protagonist (Joseph K.) has a crush on a certain Miss ÔBŸrstner.Õ This name is derived from the verb ÒbŸrstenÓ Ð German for Òbrushing,Ó which in German is also a vulgar euphemism for sexual intercourse; and this is no coincidence. There is sex all over the place: the protagonist has an affair with his attorneyÕs maid, shabbily dressed judges simply carry away women into their chambers, during Joseph KÕs conversation with the painter, you hear the painterÕs models giggle in the background. Notice the running parallel between illicit sex and dingy justice. The Viennese critic Karl Kraus had published a series of essays under the title ÒThe Chinese Wall.Ó In it Kraus attacked AustriaÕs legal system and spoke up in defence of prostitutes. Kafka knew Kraus, he attended his public readings, and he might have picked up on a phrase Kraus liked to scream at his audience. It began with: ÒBecause justice is a whore ... ,Ó (which no doubt it is.) In KafkaÕs novel the courts convene in the strangest places, in attics and lofts, under the rafters of top floors, in sub-tenancies of housing projects. This strange judicial system never allows to approach the upper echelons, but the lower charges are beggarly and sly. The whole state seems to be afflicted by an underground conspiracy, and you never know whether your friendly janitor isnÕt one of them. If it were ancient Rome, you could say the slaves are judging their masters. Joseph K. himself is a somewhat aloof and haughty character, not un-typical for a senior manager. K. works for a bank and he is a sharp dresser and moves with ease in circles of attorneys, chief administrators and CEOs. Kafka lifted out of the text the key-parable, ÒBefore the LawÓ and published it separately in a collection of shorter pieces. It is difficult to put your finger exactly on the meaning of this famous parable, but it certainly gives the entire novel in a nutshell. In the era of Stalin and McCarthy and after the horrors of the death-camps it has became fashionable to read into KafkaÕs novel a brooding indictment against oppression and persecution. I am not so sure: itÕs a tough call, because he is never told the charges, yet something seems to be expected of Joseph K., a change of heart perhaps, or a sign of redeeming humility, but K. remains unchanged, his ordeal merely infuses an ever more deepening gloom. One of the great paradigms of modern literature.

I wish to offer a friendly retort to reviewer Bob Newman, who states how Kafka would share excerpts of this book with his colleagues and would laugh out loud uproariously - and how this fact demonstrates how distant the 20th-Century American malaise is so distant from that of the same time period in Austria-Hungary. I would agree wih Newman that this is certainly a horrowing aspect of thetext; but it's also one that I participated in also while reading Harman's translation - first while reading the 5th Chapter, here titled "At the Chairman's" (where K. learns that his services as a surveyor are not even needed, but he was called anyway to the job due to a minor oversight, "the minorest of minors", I believe the text reads). I can just feel the steam rising from K.'s arrogantly-laden temple while listening to the hairman's explanation - first amused by it, then slowly becoming frustrated and probably even maddened ... funny stuff !! Maybe I only find this funny because I've never been so unfortunate to have been caught in the crossfire of such an oversight at a Liscense Branch, Court Order, etc. This scene is in no ways the climax of the text, but merely the beginning of the fall into the abyss for K. I hope others reading my retort here are moved to read the text in its entirity.

Hearing about Kafka's work is not enough: you really need to read it and experience it yourself. It's hilarious, and unfortunately all too true.

In this book, a surveyor, named K., arrives in a village and tries to get in to the castle in order to get permission to stay there and do his work, but falls into a quagmire of disfunctional bureaucracy. This may sound like a dreary read, but the book is really very funny, and reminded me too much of the real world. K spends most of the book on a fruitless quest to meet an official named Klamm who might be able to help him get into the castle. I laughed out loud at some of the ridiculous conversations he has with some of the villagers, and later I gasped in amusement and dismay as I learned more about this twisted world.

Kafka never finished writing this book, and the restored text, of which this is a translation, ends in the middle of a sentence. However this doesn't really make it any less satisfying to read. While it is not clear where the last couple of pages are going, just before that there is a long paranoid rant by one of the villagers which is great.

This translation seems to be more accurate than the older, Muir translation. There are some things that sound kind of weird here, but they sound weird in the original too.

Kafka crafts a sometime eerie, sometime funny, but always fascinating work that details the criminal legal system's prosecution/persecution of a "Josef K." The book's famous first sentence ominously forebodes the grinding machine that slowly devours Josef: a nameless, invisible bureaucracy that is omnipotent in its reach and accountable to no one. Although many novels written in the 20th century have appropriated similar versions of totalitarianism (1984, Brave New World, etc.), it should be noted that The Trial provided the template and, if you ask me, continues to stand without peer in its brilliant construction of terror caused by absurdity. Indeed, this book is, unsurprisingly, the prototypical example of the 'Kafkaesque:' feelings of guilt and alienation triggered by menacing forces that are bound by their own impenetrable logic. Anyone interested in 20th century literature ought to do himself or herself a favour and read The Trial, since the Kafkaesque informs so many of the themes and approaches to writing adopted by the century's top stylists.

(NOTE: This is a review of the book by Kafka, not this particular translation. I place it here because I feel this is the only place where it would be visible -- the other editions of the book on the store have almost no reviews. My translation, which I highly recommend, was by Willa and Edmin Muir in the 1984 Shocken paperback, which can be found here: The Trial .)

Such are the words of Titorelli, the eponymous artist of the "Painter" chapter in Kafka's classic novel of despair and confusion. Well, that's a bit disingenuous - all of Kafka's books were stories of despair and confusion, with the creeping and phantasmagoric horror of nightmares. Not all of them, however, have the hypnotic quality of The Trial, which even in its incomplete and fragmentary state manages to capture its protagonist's descent into madness (or enlightenment?) with a disconcerting precision.

The Trial is the story of K., who wakes up one morning in his boarding house room to find that agents of a mysterious Court want to arrest him for an unspecified crime. The arrest, however, seems as much a formality as an indictment - K. is allowed to live and work as normal while the proceedings of his case continue behind closed doors. K.'s attitude toward his case evolves as the process itself stagnates, running the gamut from hysteria to blasé dismissiveness to self-righteousness to (finally) despair. He comes across a set of characters whose lives are tangled inscrutably with the case and the mysterious Court, though Kafka does not focus on any one of them for long. In this way, the novel is episodic: we observe K.'s interactions with the Court and its functionaries in brief windows resembling short stories until, at last, the bureaucratic machinery ticks into place and K. finds himself confronting oblivion.

Part of the mystique of the book stems from our attempts to parse exactly what the Painter is on about. New or cursory readers of Kafka's book tend to place their emphasis upon the dystopian elements of the Court: its omnipresence, its irascibility, its brutal dismissal of K.'s human worth. While these are certainly valid observations, they do not fully capture the nature of the Court as Kafka describes it. For while it is certainly an oppressive and monolithic institution, it is also a massively dysfunctional one. K. observes to his disgust that this Court seems to have no one jurisdiction, with offices housed in the attics of tenements and abandoned buildings. Corruption seems to be rampant, and the bureaucratic measures taken by Court functionaries lack any methodology or sense. The particular brand of Bureaucratese that they speak smacks of a more benign Newspeak - less insidious only because one gets the impression the speaker doesn't know any more than you what he's talking about. During his conversations with lower functionaries, they assure him that the Lawyers and the Judges know the true nature of the Court; during his conversation with his experienced but senile Lawyer, however, it is revealed that experienced lawyers are so mired in the legal complexities of the system that they must often consult figures lower on the totem pole to try and get a sense of what any given case actually means. While we never do meet the Judges, who seem to be almost metaphysical figures, one gets the distinct impression that this incompetence goes all the way up to the top.

So what, then, is the Court? It becomes clear over the course of the story that Kafka isn't really talking about a court of law, or at least not exclusively. The Court appears in impossible places (a closet and a church among them), has functionaries whose jobs defy logic, issues indictments for a crime whose guilty verdict is inescapable except through delaying the case perpetually. We never do find out what K. is accused of, but there are tantalizing hints. If, after all, the Court is an at least partially metaphysical entity, then its jurisdiction must be the fundamental stuff of life. Indeed, every character in the book speaks in long, rambling dissertations that remind one of witness testimonies, as if they were documenting evidence for K.'s case. In a way, the specific charge does not matter: as a parable told toward the end of the book demonstrates, the point seems to be that Justice - as an abstract ideal, as something to strive for - is ultimately unattainable. It is only with this sentiment in mind that the dysfunctions of the Court (in spite of its seeming absolute power), K.'s inability to have a true romantic relationship with Ms. Burstner, and the various conflicted states of the many characters all make a sort of twisted sense - the universe they inhabit is inherently predisposed against consummation and catharsis, dooming them instead to anxiety and despair. It is a nightmare's anarchy, the meaningless chaos of a fever dream. Perhaps K.'s only real crime is that he exists, and that is enough.

And so we are left wondering: if this is the state of the world sketched in The Trial, could it also be the state of our own universe? Are all our institutions - spiritually and worldly, political and philosophical - doomed to the uselessness of the Court by the very nature of existence? Kafka provides no concrete answers, only dream-logic and the inescapable sensation of acute despair. Albert Camus, according to the back cover of my edition, once said, "Everything in [The Trial] is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety." A fitting analysis, but misleading in that Kafka was no philosopher, much less an existentialist. Kafka's genius was his ability to express the spiritual core of Camus' or Sartre's Big Ideas - existential despair, the Absurd, Authenticity and the lack thereof, etc. - in stories that make one feel them rather than just understand them intellectually. He had no need of Theory; an expert of the macabre fable, he needed only his own tortured experience and the limitless expanse of his imagination.

The translation itself is very fine, and you can read the translator's preface yourself to see what he was aiming for, to recreate the real Kafka and get away from the "Dickensian" (as he calls it) flavor of the Muir translation.... However, reading this I was horrified to find certain passages had been abandoned that I'm too attached to from the older version to give this new one a fair chance. For instance, when K. arrives in the village and sleeps at the Inn, they call the Castle to verify his appointment as Land-Surveyor. There's a paragraph or two about the strange hum on the phone-line "like a thousand voices singing", something like that, that always struck me as so jarring and and surreal and perfect in its placement at the beginning of the book catching you right off guard, -- well, I can't leave it alone. Maybe this is the "purer" version of Kafka to some readers. But going off what another reviewer said here, that Kafka's books grew like a wild plant, sprouts, branches, shoots off in every direction making any conventional finish & completion practically impossible, I feel like, ahem, this has been clipped too much with the editor's shears, ah, if you will. I feel the alternate versions, snippets, unfinished extra chapters, etc. are vital to the work and for that I still prefer the Muir translation, inaccurate as the text itself is. So I would like to see then a new version that includes all the alternate chapters and versions and so on but in this new translation.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and give this book a negative review. It's not that I don't like Kafka, I've read most of his fiction and I think he was a brilliant writer. But this book just disappointed me. It's a few hundred pages too long--he pretty much makes most of his main points in the first part of the book and the remaining narrative seems superfluous and, well, tedious. Although his other two novels are also "unfinished" I think he expressed himself much more clearly in them. I agree with the other reviewers that this novel was about many things, i.e. the quest for truth, the frustration of the invididual facing the state and society itself, etc., but I think it could have been done better, especially by someone like Kafka. While reading "The Castle" I couldn't get over the impression that I was reading the first draft of something the author probably would have refined and improved had he lived longer.

So much of what Kafka wrote about sounds like the place that Dilbert works in. Granted it has a different historical reference of early 20th century Prague, but bureaucracy is the same in any time. Beginning with the idea that no one can tell K. why he has been hired, the Castle cannot have made a mistake, we then follow him as he goes down the yellow brick road looking for the White Rabbit.

You have to understand Kafka's life to truly understand his writings. He spent most of his life working as a clerk in an insurance company. He spent the majority of his life living in the post-World War I, Czechoslovakia, in a city that was originally designed to be the provincial capital of part of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. All of a sudden it is the capital of a very week central european republic. So you have a large establishment, that doesn't have anything to do anymore but keep itself in business.

Up until WWI, most of the Czech elite, spoke and read in German. The only people who spoke Czech (or Slovak) were the illiterate peasants in the countryside. At the time of independence in 1918, there were few if any courses taught in Czech at the University of Prague, and all government business was conducted in German.

Kafka, was a non-practicing Czech Jew who had to learn Yiddish and Hebrew as an adult. He was the ultimate outsider; he spoke the wrong language and didn't practice the wrong religion; but then he didn't practice the right religion. His life, to say the least, was going nowhere fast, and that was only because it was going downhill. Based on descriptions of him by his friends, he was most likely a manic-depressive and had at least two known 'breakdowns'. He was terrible at relations with the opposite sex, having twice been engaged and then having broken them off.

There is a Lewis Carroll/Marx Brothers (not including Karl) flow to his writings; and since it seems to be train-of-thought, you wonder if he was ever on the right one, at least in his own mind.

When you keep in your own mind, that his writings predate movies like Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' or Chalie Chaplin's 'Modern Times' you can see his genius of describing workers as slaves to the system.

Who but some one who worked as an insurance clerk, could really understand the feeling of forelorness of the individual faced with an enormous bureaucracy that was mostly concerned with perpetuating itself. That the book doesn't have a true ending, makes more of an impression that if it had one. It better reflects how things don't always

At times, reading Kafka is comparable to deciphering a Dali painting or viewing an art-house film; that's not to say Kafka's prose is particularly surreal, but rather, slightly detached from reality. There are moments throughout the trial when things border on the peculiar and even the absurd, but unlike, say, The Metamorphosis, he retains some semblance of plausibility here. Reading Kafka is almost like a sensation - much like that one gets well dreaming; although the dream is not reality, for the moments your asleep it SEEMS like reality.

What exactly is the meaning of The Trial? Like Kafka's The Castle, the central theme seems to be bureaucracy, but upon closer inspection the real focus is law. What exactly is law? Who enacts it, enforces it, violates it, and who pays for these violations? Can a man break the law unwittingly? I think what Kafka touches on here - and this is just my own personal analysis, as this novel is wide-open to interpretation - are the sometimes almost all-too-apparent hypocrisies of law, foremost among them, the unquestionable infallibility of law itself. Many of the novels' characters ( perhaps all of them) are inexorably bound by the law - and to the court which enforces it - but not one character, with the exception of the protagonist, challenges or questions the nature of law itself. The more the main character Joseph K. struggles against the law and the charges laid against him, the less progress he makes, and the guiltier he becomes. It is a depressingly oppressive view of people and their place in the moral hierarchy of society.

Kafka refuses to pose the question directly: if man is fallible, and man enacted law, does that not make law fallible, or at the very least, flawed? One could argue that Jewish law is considered infallible, because it is the word of god, so Kafka shies away from such a dilemma. However, a simpler and more correct perspective would be that in Kafka's world, there is no hope, no question of escape. The law simply exists, much like how in The Castle, The Castle and it's subordinates exist, more or less as forces of nature, and to struggle against such forces would be an exercise in futility. This is the precursor to an Orwellian Dystopia.

That's not to say the novel is completely bleak - it contains bits of black humor, and the beginning is rather optimistic. But in Kafka's world, the man who struggles against the system has lost even before he has begun, and in this particular case, the man spends almost the whole of the tale figuring this out.

Now that I have read Metamorphosis and The Castle, I feel that I have been Kafka-ized. I now understand what is meant by Kafkaesque. Definitions of Kafkaesque that I have found include "bureaucracies overpowering people, leaving them with a sense of helplessness". Yes, that fits The Castle; but only if otherwise seemingly intelligent people suspend all rationality and are unable to walk away from their helplessness despite there being no barriers to doing so other than some mysterious hold the Castle seems to have over them, a hold that is never explained. Even K., an outsider who should not have been affected by this senselessness, was incapable of circumventing the ridiculous, if not non-existent, barriers and marching up to the Castle himself. Nothing actually happens in the novel. There is no real plot or action; just people spinning their wheels and going nowhere. Perhaps that fits the definition above re: the Castle (representing bureaucracies) creating a sense of helplessness in the people. Just when you think someone is about to explain something, the next several paragraphs or pages of so-called explanation explain nothing! And what are we to make of the ending where the hotel manager's wife is showing K. her closets full of beautiful gowns? No doubt, some (pseudo)intellectual will try to put great meaning to scenes such as this and maybe they are right. But from comments that I have read by other authors re: The Castle, I don't think that I am alone in wondering what we were supposed to get out of it. If star rankings are based solely on how enjoyable a novel is, then I would have given The Castle two stars. But I don't think that this novel was meant to be "enjoyed" per se. Perhaps it was intended to provoke thought, but about what I am not certain. I now feel compelled to read The Trial. Perhaps I will know more then - you think???

As a philosophical exercise this novel succeeds, as entertainment it's lacking. What I mean is that Kafka's frustration with bureaucracy comes through clearly in this work. It's his nightmare. K, the protagonist has been contracted to do work at the castle, but he cannot get there - no roads lead to the castle, no one can introduce him or take him there, and despite finding a place in the village his ultimate goal is continually thwarted.

I did appreciate how Kafka demonstrates the villagers loyalty to the officials of the castle, even when they didn't understand what the officials did, or why, or how. It's surely a commentary on questioning authority.

But the novel was frustrating and that, I believe is Kafka's intention - to evoke a strong emotional discontentment through a frustrated main character. That's the success of the novel - and it did make me think about the condition of life, being guided like a mule after the carrot on a stick.

I didn't enjoy the novel, but I learned from it and maybe that's the highest compliment of all.

- CV Rick, February 2008

The Trial The secret police turns up at a dude's apartment. The elderly lady across the street is watching through her windows. Landlord, janitor and others crowd the dude while the police officers play games with him. "One day Josef K. wakes up..." And everybody seems to be in on it. Every eye is watching his every move. Down to the minutest detail. He's then put on trial for something. But no one tells him what he is accused of. They never tell him the charges. Unreal. Absurd. Nightmarish.

i'm sitting in a cold, lonely room, headphones on, a lamp dimly gleaming on the nightstand next to me. i've just finished harman's translation of the castle, which i picked up from the library after finishing a muir translation i bought for 50 cents.

the novel tells of the struggle of K., who believes that he's been invited to a town to do some land surveying, only to realize upon his arrival that his invitation was the result of a bureaucratic mishap. he wants answers from the officials at the castle that overlooks the town, but that can never happen - how K. deals with this stark reality constitutes the subsequent "action" of the novel.

reading and thinking about this novel, i feel like K himself gazing upon the castle, doomed to forever struggle against forces beyond his control. i've now read this book twice in a month, and i still don't know what it means, and i don't think i ever will, and i still can't understand K's motivations, and i can't comprehend the workings of the castle or the village or the other characters K encounters. i'll let scholars try to pin down these things, because achieving any kind of certainty is not what this novel is about - if you're someone who'd be frustrated by something like this, don't bother reading. (besides - and i'm no philosopher - i think someone like kafka would resist attempts to assign concrete meanings to events, places, and people.)

why does't K just go back to where he came from? why does he try to marry a village girl only a few days after his arrival even though he has a wife and child back at home? who are his new assistants, and what happened to his old assistants? is this village on earth? are the castle officials human? what is happening here?

there are no answers to these questions. and yet - even though the world of the castle is but a blurred reflection of ours - the ways in which they are asked reveals an absolute truth about how our universe works.
i think in many respects, K's unending, doomed struggles to understand his situation and assign meaning to his unfamiliar surroundings mirror our own struggles to not only understand his predicament, but to understand our own lives and perhaps discover the purpose they hold. maybe there's nothing there at the end of our struggles, or maybe there's everything, or maybe we'll be cut off in mid-sentence on the most mundane of days, just like K., simply hoping for one more chance.

in 2001: a space odyssey, arthur c. clarke imagines a world in which the transformation from ape to man was caused by utterly opaque, alien monoliths. despite their central importance to the ascension of humankind, their inner workings and their purpose and their function were mostly hidden, their mystery and necessary knowledge forever obscured. i think the castle is much like one of these monoliths - utterly inscrutable, and yet in the end, absolutely necessary.

I read "The Trial" when I was in my early teens and I still haven't found a book that I have found more significant. I have tried reading authors considered in the same vein as Kafka, like Walser (beautifully crafted prose, but lacking purpose) or Pelevin (entertaining, but gimmicky), and none are a match. Even within Kafka's scattered body of work this is the best he produced.

I never understood why people peg Kafka as a surrealist. I don't think people who claim this understood what they read. He writes about our bondage to social norms, how we are enslaved by them, and about power structures in human relationships. It's easy to understand this, when we read the "letter" he wrote to his father, a domineering personality, who had such a devastating influence in Kafka's life. Sure enough, many of the settings in his stories are exaggerated or have a supernatural element to them, but the absurdity of every day life is real and true.

There are critics who give Kafka's works a Jewish interpretation, which is fine and probably makes sense, given that Kafka was Jewish. But I'm not Jewish, and when I first read this as an adolescent at the beach (the perfect place to read Kafka), I completely related to preposterous situations which K. -- the story's protagonist -- was faced with, and his inability to react to them, trapped as he was in the "must-do's" of conventional society. This is completely universal, and that's the hallmark of great works. While he attempts to struggle at first, by the end of the book, K. has been lulled into indifference, surrendering the control of his own life. Charged with some unspecified crime, he allows himself to be driven through a trial over which he has no grasp, and in reality, there is no escaping the sentence. If you examine your life, or perhaps even the lives of those around you, you may reach the unsettling conclusion that this is a true-to-life story about everyone you know.

Kafka gives us an image of man, one hauntingly disturbed, in which forces, prevalent everywhere, and without reason, crash down upon us as we drown in a vertigo of still and silent sadness.

He relates the adventures of K., who comes to "The Castle". It seems like no one wants him, the land surveyor, there. The situations become surreal...involving a promotion to Janitor, a woman named Frieda, and a menacing Schoolteacher.

In the end, we all go away. And, while we are, it is as if we already were gone. Such is the state of mind one will find in Kafka's book, that of being insignificant in world that is hostile to our every move, that pushes us down, and only seeks to move us up when it is to its own advantage. And, the sad yet seemingly happy people we see everywhere, who come and go like seasons that never return, they serve only to remind us how love is only conditional in a `world that is a will to power, and nothing besides'. "Our only hope is blindness."

Also recommended: Toilet: The Novel by Michael Szymczyk (A Tribute to the Literary Works of Franz Kafka)

As Walter Benjamin indicates, Kafka's ouvre is the testament of our time. What we really needed was an attorney to litigate the absurd madness the direction of our civilization has taken. Kafka gave us that.
Now, let's set the record straight. There are a number of reviews here that partake in this madness. To understand Kafka, one must have shed real tears, and not only for oneself. Afficianados of Ayn Rand take note. The Castle is a masterpiece, perhaps even greater than The Trial (imo - yes), and one of the magisterial achievements in prose fiction. The terminal unfinished conversation, breaking off mid-sentence is ... perfection. The seal of the unanimous approval of destiny. What more needed to be said? The endless rondo of futility must continue unto death. A losing battle, initiated by an obscure mistake ... but we must fight on through the slough of materiality, pettiness, and despair until the end. What more appropriate condemnation?
Further, Harmon's translation is vastly superior to that of the Muirs. Be aware of this fact. Harmon's translations are the BEST. In time, I doubt whether the Muir translations will be read by any but scholars, the uneducated, or the unfortunate.

I offer the startling proposal that Franz Kafka's The Castle is, after all, about life as it is lived by all of us.

The novel is difficult for us "post post moderns" for several reasons.

The first is that the action is set in a time and place which no longer exist: Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before and possibly during World War I.

Kafka's readers were familiar with the social structure and physical description of the village and Castle of his story. But it is not easy for us to understand the relative rank and relationships between the Count Westwest, the Count's authorities, the villagers, peasants, officials, stewards, substewards, lawyers, domestics, gentlemen, chairmen, chamber maids, coachmen, school teachers, innkeepers, land surveyors, gentleman's servants, fire chiefs, shoe makers, and so forth. But we have to form an imaginative relationship with and between all of them so that we can enter into the complex of social and psychological relationships presented in the book.

The geography of the village and especially of the Inn, with its corridors, tap room, etc. is presented in vivid detail but is unlike anything we are likely to encounter in modern life, and therefore it seems almost dreamlike even though it was obviously part of Kafka's daily experience and is in no way "Kafkaesque."

A third difficulty is the extraordinarily dense nature of the story. The plot of The Castle has been described as simple, and in fact it is simple. But the story has layers and layers of detailed information that interweave, are clarified and sometimes contradicted by the skein of events, and detailed reactions to the events, that run through 25 chapters. We need a map of characters and their relationships with each other to separate the planned ambiguities from the unplanned. Otherwise we quickly become lost in maze of detail, which was not Kafka's intention.

A fourth difficulty is the humor. Humor does not usually travel well, either in time or space. But whether we get all the jokes or not, it is obvious that The Castle is full of humor, from slapstick and pranks all the way to paradox, the absurd, high irony and self-mockery. We need to be on the lookout for humor, everywhere.

Kafka loved Charlie Chaplin and we should not forget that fact while reading The Castle. Chaplin's film, The Tramp, opens with tramp walking down a dusty road with a walking stick and a small -- do we dare say "rucksack?" I would bet that Kafka was inspired to open The Castle with the same image. Chaplin's film, A Dog's life, opens with a tramp gazing up at what looks like a castle with a flag flowing over its crest, and I would wager that Kafka's The Castle was influenced by that film and its opening image as well. To get into the right mood for reading The Castle, I recommend watching both of these silent movies.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that "a serious philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes." The Mathematician John Allen Paulos points out a relationship between the humor of Groucho Marx and the philosophical work of Bertrand Russell and George Pitcher in "Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll" shows the same relationship between the humor of Carroll and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. I propose, for someone else to show with quotations, that Kafka does the same with the thought of the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard. In fact, the entire novel, The Castle, seems to me to be an absurd and often humorous meditation on the famous saying of Kierkegaard "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

As an example of high irony and self-mockery, one of the characters, Amalia asks K, in response to his professed interest in the Castle,

"The influence of the castle? ... do you really care about such stories? ... there are people who feed on such stories ... but you do not strike me as one of them." "Yes I am," said K, "I am indeed one of them, whereas I am not greatly taken by those who do not concern themselves with such stories and simply make others concern themselves with them." "Well yes," said Amalia, "but people are interested in different ways, I once heard of a young man whose mind was taken up day and night with thoughts of the Castle, he neglected everything else, people feared for his ordinary faculty of reason since all his faculties were always up at the Castle, but in the end it turned out that it wasn't actually the Castle he was thinking of but only the daughter of a scullery maid at the offices, he got her, and then all was fine again." "I would like that man, I think," said K, "As for your liking that man," said Amalia, "I'm not so sure about that, but you might like his wife. Now don't let me disturb you, but I am going to bed ..." p. 205 (All quotes are from the Harman translation published by Shocken Books.)

There are many examples of prankish, almost slapstick humor such as the following,

"Erlanger .. he's known for his memory and for his ability to judge people, he simply knits his brow, that's all it takes for him to recognize anyone, often even people whom he's never seen before, whom he has only heard or read about, and in my case, for instance, he could hardly have seen me before. But though he recognizes everyone right away, he asks first (who you are) as though he were unsure."
p. 238

"[Brunswick] is actually quite quick. It's one form his stupidity takes." p.68

"So you are merely acquainted with the office furnishings at the Castle?" K asked [the chairman] rudely. "Yes," said the chairman, with an ironic and yet grateful smile, "they're the most important things about it." p.67

"... and since the chair stood by the bed they stumbled over it and fell down ... She sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought with their heads boring into each other's [...]; their embraces and arched bodies, far from making them forget, reminded them of their duty to keep searching, like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other's bodies, and then, helpless and disappointed, in an effort to catch one last bit of happiness, their tongues occasionally ran all over each other's faces. Only weariness made them lie still, and be grateful to each other. Then the maids came up, "Look at the way they're lying there," one of them said, and out of pity she threw a sheet over them. p. 46

Another difficulty that must be overcome is that there are many long speeches where it isn't certain which character is talking. Sometimes it seems as if an omnipotent narrator is telling the story but then it becomes clear, or we recall, that it is one of the characters presenting his unique point of view of events and people. Also, it is important never to forget that K (the main character) and the narrator are not the same person (and, of course, that neither is Kafka!)

Then there is the planned ambiguity. For example K has been called to the village by the Castle to be a land surveyor. But in the first chapter, this is cast into doubt by a telephone call from the Bridge Inn to the Castle, which fails to corroborate this important "fact." A few minutes later, a call comes from the Castle to the Bridge Inn to report that an error has been made and that K was, in fact, called by the Castle to be a land surveyor.

It is crucial for understanding the story that we separate the planned confusion from our own confusion that results from not understanding what we are reading. A typical reader simply concludes that his own confusion and Kafka's planned confusions are the same.

The Castle is very complex. The complexity is impossible to clarify here, obviously, but most of the complexity is not in actions and events, such as Amalia tearing up a piece of paper and throwing it at a messenger, but in the emotions and reactions produced in a family, in the entire village and even the officials of the Castle by seemingly trivial actions. Unraveling these complex emotions and relationships is the most challenging task presented to us by The Castle.

The last difficulty that I would like to point out, and perhaps the hardest one for many readers, is the problem of thinking that Kafka is not describing the world as it is but only a surrealistic, crazy world where nothing makes sense. But, in fact, Kafka is describing the world as it still exists today. He is describing the psychology of real people who are still alive and functioning in corporations, schools, churches, universities and governments in America and the rest of the world.

We must enter into the world of The Castle expecting to find ourselves and the people we've encountered in our own lives if we want to make sense of it, to appreciate it for the great work of art that it is and to appropriate it for our own needs which are immense.

It would be strange to not give a book of this reputation 5 stars. I do so with no reservation either, but this wasn't really what I'd call a literary masterpiece.

The story traces the logic of K a man arrested without cause. The stream of thought never really ends in the book as his thoughts are influenced by his encounters with other people and as he is disillusioned about the society he lives in to some degree. He never becomes disillusioned enough to see what awaits him though.

The tone and style of the writing is immersive, consistent and relentless putting us in the mind of the accused, and the writing is clear and certainly makes a clear and fine exposition out of what the author set out to do, which was to show the madness of giant bureaucracy with little care for the life of others.

Its a good read, and one thing that occured to me is how much smarter the system is than an actual human being, which gives that trapped feeling that the author does so well. How could it not be "smarter" especially today, with pages and pages of rules and paid positions and so forth at that time and now add in computers the power of bureaucracy probably only increases.

On the one hand its not a great literary masterpiece, but on the other hand it is such an important book that I don't really care.

I have read the Muir and the Harman translations and I feel the Harman version is a restoration of Kafka's Castle to the english language. Sentences are often long and punctuation sparse, this brings out the intended atmosphere of the novel which is close to surreal. The literary critics have posited numerous interpretations of the Castle but beware about becoming too dogmatic about any of them. This novel defies easy explanation and is purposely enigmatic. K. experiences many setbacks, switchbacks, and confusions on his trail to his goal, even his goal is an enigma to himself. Just as in life when we believe we have the answers disillusion is not far behind, K.'s struggles are thwarted and he thinks he's getting somewhere only to find he must constantly re-assess his position. It is so appropriate that this novel ends in mid sentence.

Probably not the most recommendable place to start for someone unfamiliar with Kafka, but if you've read other works by Kafka and have enjoyed them, you'll need to get around to this one eventually. Personally, I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. It is true that nothing much really happens, in the typical sense, and that the book is distinctly unfinished and probably flawed on a number of levels. But in some senses this only enhances the mysterious nature of the book. It is utterly surreal and ultimately pointless as a conventional narrative, but rather resembles an epic, highly detailed, inherently meaningful, yet hopelessly ambiguous dream. I find this mix and this atmosphere extremely appealing, and I have never seen it in a purer, more innocently perfect form than here. A book full of magic.

The Trial

The Ubiquity and Impersonal-ness of the Tyrannical State

In this haunting and stifling novel, by Kafka, Mr. K, a normal successful banker, who has affairs with beautiful women and is much envied by his colleagues -- at least until he is arrested (on his 30th birthday), where he descends into an impersonal hell, which apparently in the end, was not at all of his own making.

It seems, but is never altogether clear, that K has been betrayed to the faceless authorities by unknown betrayers. Once in the impersonal bureaucratic grinding machine, K seems unable to get out, or to recover. Being lost in a bureaucratic maze is a theme that Kafka has milked to perfection before, as it was also used in his other novels, "Metamorphosis," in particular.

Once he is arrested, the "bill of particulars" of the crime for which he is "being held over" for is never given to him; no judgment is made against him; he waits interminably to be seen by the courts but only tricky lawyer appear to give him information that invariably is useless to his case. His frustration mounts but is never completely resolved. Until in the end, where a priests offers him a parable about a man who waits his whole life to enter the doorway of the law, K seems completely lost. He interprets the parable to mean that the state itself is but one big lie made into the rule of the world.

The novel is scary in the almost imperceptible and seamless way that the faceless state apparatus snags, sucks one into, and then takes over, and entraps Mr. K's life. Kafka makes it seem that it is possible for it to happen to any one in almost any society, including in our "so-called" safe democracy. All one has to do is look at what has happened to many of the innocent people arrested as "suspected terrorists," and who were not allowed to contact their families or see lawyers, some of whom are still kept incommunicado even today. It is a cautionary tale that freedom must be defended everyday, and then defended some more.

Five stars

There are so many levels to Kafka's writing, it's hard to write about his masterpiece in such a small space. The Castle is a book that shows a political system the people cannot get in touch with, never really see, and can only guess at. This was written around 1920, pre-Orwell, pre-Huxley, even pre-Anthem, a distopia novel that is better than any others. Kafka's citizens, like America's, can never really contact the Castle like how we cannot ever really contact our castle, the white house, directly. This book may even be considered a work of prophesy by one of the greatest geniuses to ever live.
Another great thing about this book is how is shows nothing ever beginning or ending. K. tries to get to the Castle, doesn't; K. fires his assistants, he sees them again; K. is accepted as the surveyor, he is denied... Nothing seems to have a point, but that in itself is the point. Life is just and endless round of disappoints and no no clear cut endings or beginnings. Life is absurd, and while we may laugh at the antics of the assistants at first, doesn't it get kind of creepy after a while, kind of like you KNOW people like that, people who you can see through but everyone else loves for some reason?
This book is dense, long, and very dark. It may also be (next to Ulysses) the most important work of fiction of the twentieth century, showing us how absurd and useless are lives really are. No one can ever reach the castle, it stands in sight, but we can never achieve the enlighenment or promminence nessicary to get inside. Kafka's genius will astound you, but I would suggest reading The Trial and some of the short stories before attempting to tackle this difficult work. It pays to be "in the Kafka know" when reading The Castle, it'll be much more enjoyable.

The Castle is one of those books that forever changes your literary perspective. Kafka's absurd storyline coupled with his predernatural prose and comic genius make for a very entertaining novel. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book is how fresh and timely it remains. The Castle comments on the utter despair an outsider suffers when confronted with the bureaucratic and totalitarianism regime of a foreign land. Perhaps the most tremendous aspect of this book is relating to the main character K and feeling so utterly hopeful and in turn destitute as he does. Although the book does not exactly have an ending, the price we pay for Kafka's genius is his failure to complete works. I recommend this translation because it seems to capture the essence of Kafka's message. If you've read The Trial or any of Kafka's short stories and enjoyed them, this book is for you. If you've never read Kafka, this book is for you too.

Kafka's writing is like taking a trip into the most terrifying nightmare you have ever experienced.. He was so concious of the guilt that dominated the personality of modern man.. There is always someone watching always someone observing your every move - and to take it further there is a man watching that man who is watching you and so on infinitely.. This trial of man kind is the symptom of a successful marketing economy and its greatest disease to the nature of humanity..

K is a man who does not know what he did wrong or who accusses him - it appears that the beaurocratic chain is stretched so far that there is no direct access to the facts.. (think of Kafka's own occupation - and it becomes evident why his writing focuses so much on beaurocracy).. But, like 'the stranger' by albert camus, 'the trial' seems to address the spiritual sickness of modern man.. To think of Kafka as a spiritual writer seems almost preposterous - but I am not talking of the ordinary judeao-christian meaning of the word.. Kafka's world is a world where no man knows himself let alone his neighbor.. He can't see the tree for all of its leaves - he is blind and inept..

'the trial' hits like a ton of bricks and is a modern classic.. Another book you should read if you like 'the triral' is 'the castle' which I believe is even more dream-like.

Being the last (and unfinished) work of the brilliant, but very bizarre writer Franz Kafka, this book weaves a strange tale of supposedly autobiographic search and discovery. It is difficult and anguishing to read this book, and I wonder if Kafka would have really wanted it published had he not died before finishing writing it. It feels like a long swim upstream in a cold river, which numbs the senses. But somehow you want to know what happens to the main character, K. Does he succeed in his plans? Is his success also subject to the laws of perception set up in this story? If you can make it through this one, you might have a greater appreciation for Kafka's other works, such as "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial" (and maybe all other books!). I have to say, his style is certainly unique, but I think I appreciated it much more in his other writings.

I feel a little guilty giving this book four and a half stars (as opposed to five) because it is an exceptional work in many ways and I definitely recommend it. For one thing, the myriad ways this book has been interpreted suggests that it is extremely thought provoking for just about everyone who reads it. I certainly found it very interesting and mildly disturbing (in a good way). I give it a half star ding only because I needed a little more elaboration on the forces at work (both internal and external) against the main character. I understand that such elaboration might have taken away from the book's themes and perhaps even made them less compelling; however, at the end of the book, I still felt a little yearning for something more, like Kafka could've pushed this novel a little further (or perhaps been a little less subtle) without taking away from its overall effect. Paul Gehrman, Author, Kaleidoscope

The 4 star review for this book is, actually, for Kafka, not the translation. I've read some pretty bad reviews of The Trial's several editions; I think anyone attempting to start their Kafka experience with this novel would give it a terrible review. The text is rough, and of course incomplete, since Kafka never finished a full novel. If one reads his novella The Metamorphosis (one of his longer stories which was published in his lifetime), we can see where he may have gone back and edited The Trial. The story is very compelling, though, and evokes an age which is somewhat parallel to ours...simply that many things go on behind the scenes and outside our field of view, and situations may arise in which we have no idea why we are going through them. The first sentence of The Trial evokes this...we have no idea why Josef K. is being arrested...it's unimportant to the novel. The important part is that he believes he never broke the Law, so we must believe him through his trial experience.

Since I've had experience with the old Muir translations of Kafka's works, I can say that this translation is so much easier to read. German is often treated to a ham-fisted English translation and warrants a certain amount of expression on the part of the translator; this one reads very easily, as if it were written in English to begin with. To conclude, this book would be a great one to get into the mind of Kafka, since it is fragmentary and not yet subject to revision which would undoubtedly have occurred had he not died in 1924. The very helpful translator's preface as well as the incomplete fragments of chapters in the back also aid this in-depth look.

The thing I love about Kafka is how theatrical his style is. He creates these series of grotesquely humorous tableaux, and then steps back and lets the reader make what they will of them. Reading The Trial I felt I could perfectly picture each scene as though I was watching a film, and there's something about this sort of cold objectivity which, when other authors use it, feels secure and safe, but when Kafka does it, feels charged with anxiety and some unspoken menace that's always looming just around the next corner. It reminds me of Gogol's writings more than anything else, where you see the superstitious, old Europe clashing with the malaise-inducing bureaucracy brought about by the new Europe

I couldn't have cared less about a character or what happens to him. The only terrifying thing about the story is its pacing, and centrality on a damn near reprehensible protagonist. Hard to say "anti-hero".

There are numerous ways to look at a work of Kafka, some of which have yet to be explored. Because Kafka's works were published post-mortem, we may never know his intended message. This should not detract from us finding our own meaning in the work.

Many people have sat for hours wondering what the benefit of their meaningless job is. K.'s nightmare is more in depth because he does not even know what his job is. He is a "land surveyor", yet he can not penetrate the walls of the castle he is supposed to survery. Nor, despite being called to survey land, does he have an assignment or an idea for the reason of his calling. Adding to this problem is the alterior motives of those around him. Even his own apparent girlfriend has a greater motive than K.'s love. With the hidden agendas that swirl around K. like a twister, nobody seems to know who is really in charge. In much the same way as K. is confused, the reader is certain to feel confusion.

The world that Franz Kafka created has never been duplicated by another writer. When you experience the endless maze of doors to nowhere that is Kafka's literary world, you will experience that unique nightmare of an isolated society and bureaucracy that haunted his dreams.

One morning Joseph K. is arrested. It is never made clear what the charges are, but K. always maintains his innocence, as he grapples with a bureaucracy that slowly strangles his career and consumes his life.
Franz Kafka's 'The Trial' was published posthumously shortly after his death. It was never completely finished and it was unclear how the chapters were to be ordered. It is no surprise then that the plot is somewhat episodic. I had expected the story to be a dystopian nightmare, instead it was blackly humourous as K. deals with the judicial bureaucracy and various absurd situations.
There are many themes and interpretations, but the most obvious (and to me the most relevant) is the power of government and bureaucracy to destroy lives, not through active malice but as an impersonal force like a car driving over a squirrel . Once K. has been arrested he can never be acquitted, he can only hope to delay the final guilty verdict.
'The Trial' is a monumentally important work, that is more relevant than ever as government and its attendant bureaucracies have more impact on our lives with every passing year.

Kafka I maintain is the funniest writer in 20th Century Literature. Seriously. You don't think so - name another great comic writer. A GREAT comic writer. Yes, yes, there are funny writers, such as P.G. Woodehouse, there are writers who ram their books with jokes like an goose liver on the eve of fois gras, but who can match Kafka for sheer, metaphysical, universal funniness. Kafka is Charlie Chaplin's embodiment that life is a tragedy in close up, a comedy in the long shot. Up close, the story of Joseph K is indeed a ghastly one. As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out, the trajectory of this sorry tale is no arcing parabola but a tale of a man who is already in a pretty sorry way at the start and finds his plight gets steadily worse with no respite. What misery! K, imprisoned for an unspecified offence, lurches woefully from one mishap in the penal bureaucracy to another, meeting characters singularly unsuited to helping out in his plight - a painter, a priest. In the end he faces his inevitable fate with the sort of shrug reminiscent of Maimonides. The final page has a scene of black comedy of a pitch not even Samuel Beckett managed to accomplish - the odious knife passing ceremony in front of the victim. Poor Joseph K. Kafka was a proponent of the view that just when you think you are at rock bottom and things can't get any worse - that's the point at which they inevitably will.

Poor Franz.

And then he gained the posthumous reputation as the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century.

What comedy!

Outside of the Russian authors it's hard for me to think of an author I like more than Kafka. I own everything he's every written, whether I have read all of his stories is a different matter lol. I have read "The Trial", and have read some of his short stories. I even did a school paper on two of them, "The Vulture" and "Home-Coming". But, "The Castle" is somewhat disappointing.
When I first read "The Trial" I had a lot of ideas as to what it represented. I felt a connection with the main character, but, here with "The Castle", I'm debating what is this book about? My first guess was\is the castle clearly represents the government. But I wouldn't call "The Castle" a political book. As with all of Kafka's novels, they are incomplete. I noticed this bothered some people when reading "The Trial", but I thought the book was a masterpiece. I've also noticed some people are bothered by this book being incomplete as well. While I'm not really upset over that, I will admit, I did think about it more. Many characters are just forgotten. We have no clue what will happen to them. The last chapter I found unnecessary. And hated the last sentence in the book.
But would I call this a bad book? No. Maybe I just like Kafka so much I can't be hard on him. I do think there is some substance to this book, it just takes a while to absorb it, but, I don't think it's as rewarding as "The Trial".
Would I encourage someone to read this book? Only if your a Kafka fan. In order to "test the waters" read some of the short stories and "The Trial", I haven't read "Amerika" yet, so I can't comment on it, but "The Castle" should not be your introduction into Kafka's world.
Bottom-line: For me, simply not as thought provoking as other works by Kafka. I enjoyed it to a point, but was left somewhat disappointed. Has a sloppy ending and seems as if it doesn't resolve anything.

Many critics consider The Trial Kafka's best work. As in other main Kafka writings, life in relation to the demands of the society, is an ordeal. In this novel, K is found guilty and prosecuted by a non existent Court with non existent Judges, within the framework of a not revealed Law and without explaining the nature of his crime, Kafka displays his particulary complex visión of the existence of man in a society he deems totalitarian, how man has to fight all his life against the corruption and oppression of the System. The novel reveals Kafka's own psycho, looks like he has conceived a negative view of life and that he also was extremely paranoid. The Trial has many parables and interpretations, that is why it gets worth reading, it is up to every reader to develop his own conclusions.

This book is my favourite Kafka book. It is about a man who is very close to his goal but he can never reach it. There is always something that prevents him from getting there completely and when he believes he is there, he is further away then ever...
I had a strange experience relating to this. I was out driving outside of Vienna, Austria when I saw a roadsign towards a Kafka monument. I stopped my bike and went back to find the place were Kafka died. It was a museum. I tried to open the door, but it was closed. I rang the bell and I knocked on the door, but no-one answered. I could hear voices from inside and I could see people move through the curtains, but nobody would let me in. Then I suddenly realized that this was probably the monument itself; being that close, but never reaching it completely.

I don't consider myself a literary type. I've read Metamorphosis and other books described as "Kafka-esque" and loved them. While I didn't get into the story like I have other books, I enjoyed the creepiness and strangeness of it.

Should you read this novel? Is it worth your time? I think if it were written today, Kafka would have had to self-publish it. As it was, however, it was an unpublished, unfinished work, not unlike David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, or Michael Hastings' The Last Magazine. It was published after Kafka died, and he had left instructions for it, and everything else he had written, to be burned. Was he kidding? What is The Trial? It seems to me to be two works in one - one a farcical slapstick comedy, the other a metaphor for the absurdity of life, as relevant today, maybe more so, as when Kafka wrote it. In the beginning I was unimpressed. My first note, written on page 15 says: *seems like a bad play - boring me.* Further on, page 42-43, I wrote: *K. is a stupid idiot--like Kafka. A stream of consciousness/imagination. A flight of fantasy w/no purpose other than for his own amusement.* Then on page 45, I wrote: *A cartoon - the Three Stooges, or Charlie Chapman.* On page 72 I scribbled: *Alice in Wonderland.* But I kept reading, by now having gotten into the rhythm of the thing, writing on page 105: *so typically Kafkaesque.* I now had a better understanding of what Wallace meant in Infinite Jest, when Hal relates his experience with the grief counselor as "Kafkaesque." Wallace is referencing Josef K.'s experience in The Trial.
And then Boom! All of a sudden, on page 112, K.'s experience became mine, or mine his. I, me, I put myself on trial ... and it is the protracted trial. "A single hangman could replace the entire court." (pg. 154) Yes! That's it! I thought. However, "the trial must be kept constantly spinning within the tight circle to which it's artificially restricted." Yep. And there is wisdom, also; and my thoughts of the way things are, are so similar, here now, 90 years later. " ... it's often better to be in chains than to be free." (pg.190) Uh-huh. "The correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive." (pg. 219) Chew on that.
And finally, in the Fragments section: "but K. could not change his behavior; he succumbed to self-deception ... the most disheartening practical experience taught him nothing, and if he failed at a thing ten times, he thought he could succeed on the eleventh try ... ." That sentiment, today, is thought to define insanity.
This novel depressed me.

This is perhaps one of the hardest books I've read. The sentences stretch for lines, and the paragraphs take entire chapters. but don't let these deterr you: this style only helps to create this existential nightmare, makes it more dream-like. Absurdity abounds this book: K.'s struggle to get to talk to Klamm is rebuked countless times, making him start over again. Pepi's dream to have Frieda's position is merely taken away by Fireda, thus making her start over. And Frieda's plans of are merely thrown away. Martin Buber's philosophy is, perhaps, a greater theme in this book. If you are not familiar with I AND THOU, I recomend reading it, because his philosophy gives the greatest explanation as to why nothing was accomplished. And being familiar with Kierkegaard greatly helps to lead tyo some sort of an understanding behind this enigmatic work. I loved this book and hated alll at once. I may not call it Kafka's masterpeice, though, because I still have to read THE TRIAL. THE CASTLE is hard to get through, but it is worth the effort.

I read the book when I was 22. Twenty years later, I can still feel the resonance of the feelings that I empathized from the book--why I should say that I had absorbed those feeling and they had been part of me ever since, something that sent me into sudden bursts of deep depression. Other books have intrigued me, bewildered me, left me thinking or even obsessed for days or months, but none have ever touched me as much.

Not recommended for people with weak hearts or feeble minds though.

Whenever asked who is my favorite writer, my response of Franz Kafka usually generates in the inquisitor a look of severity, as if I had responded with the most stifling and impenetrable answer imaginable. I have always been positively baffled by the public perception of Kafka as a "difficult" author, a "serious" author, one of those authors good for no one beyond college professors. This is simply not the case. All of three of Kafka's novels are thrilling, nightmarish, and haunting, to be sure, but they are also downright hysterical, containing countless moments of slapstick humor worthy of the great comics. Furthermore, Kafka's novels are probably the most compulsively readable of any I've ever read. I've yet to spend more than two days reading or re-reading one of the three novels, as once I'm drawn into Kafka's spell I have no choice but to finish (that previous statement obviously fits right in with Kafka's universe). I can't stand it when people consider Kafka "the guy who writes stories about people turning into bugs". The Castle is my favorite of Kafka's works, a novel so rich and beautiful, so full of crazy characters and imagination, it is the logical precursor to Roald Dahl and Tom Wolfe and Terry Southern and other writers of the comically absurd. Monty Python surely owes a huge debt to The Castle. The Castle is indescribable. There has never been another novel quite like it, before or after, and surely every reader will find it a different experience. It is a masterpiece in that it hints at serious post-modern themes and events, but remains ambiguous enough to take under its wing any number of interpretations. Great 20th century novels like Orwell's 1984 and Nabakov's Lolita probably won't stand up to future scrutiny the way Kafka's will, because Kafka is the only writer of the 20th century to succesfully represent the human experience through the form itself, letting the content and meaning transform entirely according to the reader.

Having read a few works by Kafka to include The Trial, I must say that I found them very enjoyable and thought-provoking. However, I found The Castle to be quite tedious reading. I feel that he pretty much made his point in the first 10 chapters and the last 10 did not add anything to the theme or to the interest I had in the story line or characters. The Castle is very similar to The Trial: there is a man who is being controlled by persons/forces unseen, there are many absurd acts and situations, the man is helpless, no one can/will help him, etc... This all worked very well with The Trial but here it just doesn't and maybe because it is an unfinished body of work. But even knowing how Kafka planned on ending it (which is included in this edition), I still don't believe it would add much. Perhaps another reason it doesn't work is because the character in The Castle chooses to stay in the village and willingly and knowingly makes things worse for himeslf. I found myself wondering why this guy just didn't go back from where he came. Whereas in The Trial, the character had nowhere else to go for he lived his whole life in that village so it made his predicament much more plausible and interesting. So, should you read this? Well, if you are a casual reader of Kafka, like myself, I would suggest reading The Trial first and if you like that then try this book. However, if you read The Trial and find it dry, then don't bother with this. If you are an avid reader of Kafka, then you probably have already read The Castle, enjoyed it, and are wondering what planet I am from.

At first read I gave it two stars, then I read it again and it deserves 4 stars...

I read this after reading 'The Trial'(which was excellent). At first read I found this book not interesting because I had the impression that the story begins well but then goes too slow and often very hard to follow the plot and understand what's going on. But this is Kafka's style or writing to get the readers to ponder about things such as bureaucracy and search of meaning in the modern world.

If you like Kafka's style of writing you will like this book Otherwise, probably not....
I suggest to start with his book 'The Trial'

This famous novel tells the story of Joseph K, who is accused by unidentified agents from an inaccessible and unidentified agency, of a crime that remains unknown and unnamed to Joseph K and to the reader.

This novel is very demanding, and it's not an edge-of-your-seat page-turner by any account. So why read this book? Well, first of all, although the language is rather simple, it is still beautifully written. Secondly, this is one of those books that make you contemplate the role of the individual against a totalitarian system, and the struggle of the individual against a vast complicated network of bureaucracy. This is not a light read by any stretch either, however, it is very rewarding for those who willing put the necessary effort into it.

This book is as disturbing as it is boring: hundreds of pages of episodes in which the reader is unsure of what is really going on, all with a vivid and depressing dream-like atmosphere and acute anxiety. The characters seem as caught in the strange bureaucracy as does the reader in the seemingly endless text.
I still have no clear idea why this novel is supposed to be one of the greatest of the 20c. While it pioneered a kind of political surrealism, it just goes in circles and nothing is ever resolved. Perhaps its sheer consistency is what makes academics proclaim its greatness. There is little clear plot and the nothingness of it just goes on and on in a static Angst.
If you really read this, you may be as disappointed as was I. It is yet another example of a "classic" that is unspeakably dull and perhaps over-rated by critics who are as far from the normal reader as an English professor can be from a lover of books. But then, Kafka had instructed Max Brod to burn this novel, due to its incompleteness.
Read if you are more interested in slogging through a classic than enjoying one!

I disagree with many of the reviews of this work. "The Castle" is deliberately cumbersome to get across the feeling of bureaucracy; this makes it perhaps a good read when you've got nothing to do and are feeling a bit philosophical or pessimistic, but it's not something you can read after work. I liked "The Trial" a lot; it blended a bleak view of the world of guilt, punishment and self-righteousness with some good humour ["Are you a house painter?"] There is much less humour in "The Castle" and Josef K's character does not develop anywhere near as fully in this book. It is hard not to put this down to the fact that it was far from finished and the text breaks off mid-sentence, whilst "The Trial" [though still unfinished] has an ending and was nearer completion. There is still the surreal interactions with women in this book and the stubborn conversations that don't go anywhere, but they are in a much less animated tone. Also, the chapters where the procedures of bureacracy are described or K's "story so far" gone over are terribly boring. Some may say that this is to build up a sense of the bureacratic nature, but doing it in this way was no better than just reprinting the criminal code of Russia. I'd say the last few chapters are amongst the best, such as when he talks to an official that can never get to sleep.

This unfinished chef-d'oeuvre begins with the hero (a man named "K.") entering an unknown village where a castle looms overhead from a far off hilltop. Later the reader is told that K. was summoned by The Castle to be employed as a land-surveyor, though there is always the nagging suspicion that this is not true, as he is never admitted entrance to The Castle. From this point on, the book concerns itself with K.'s obsession with reaching The Castle. Why, and for what benefit, the reader does not know. Still, whether or not we feel sympathy for the hero or interest for his goal, is of little importance compared to the interest we take in the events that seem to just lurk around the corner at any moment. The reader constantly has the impression that everything is just about to explode. `The Caste' is one of the few books I have read more than once, which I have enjoyed every time. Having just finished the book for the third time, I felt as though it were the first, and it was sad to come to the end (though remember, there is no real end as the work was never finished). Kafka's genius lies in setting a mood to a place and creating a timeless and eerie setting. Like the strange version of Paris in the great masterpiece by Roman Payne, 'Crepuscule'; or the fortress in Nabokov's brilliant book, 'Invitation to a Beheading', the unknown village in 'The Castle' is a bizarre world that seems to live independently of the rest of the world and independently of all time. Even Kafka's mention of telephones and other modern objects seems not to detract from the timeless world he has invented. For writers and those who study literature, `The Caste' is an illuminating guide to great literary style. For readers and lovers of literature, `The Caste' is the perfect book to get lost in.

Franz Kafka was obsessed with dreams, and THE CASTLE is his attempt to depict the modern world of corporate and governmental bureaucracy as a crazed nightmare. The novel possesses the logic of dreams, and there is a dreamlike quality to everything that happens in the book. As in a dream, people and situations transform effortlessly into something entirely different, as when one of the young, silly assistants of the protagonist K. suddenly appears to be a much older, decrepit man. Though his transformation is absurd, it is part and parcel of the logic of the village dominated by The Castle.
I first read this novel years ago when the only option in translation was the Muir translation. This new complete translation, which includes a large section that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod decided to excise, transforms the novel into an entirely different book. For one thing, the section that Brod left out indicates even more vividly the degree to which the novel is concerned with depicting the more horrific aspects of modern bureaucratic life. For another, the manner in which the text simply breaks off in mid-sentence reinforces the nightmarish quality of the book, for just as we wake up from a dream, never able to complete the tale, so we break away from the narrative, never knowing what K.'s fate is.
The novel contains more a situation than a plot. K., a surveyor, arrives in a village having been hired by the local Castle, presumably to survey. Instead, K. quickly learns that he may not have been hired at all, and manages to break rapidly a number of laws of which he was utterly unaware and whose logic is far from obvious. In this way we see Kafka exploring one of the great themes of his literature: that all individuals are guilty until proven innocent, and that we have no idea what it means to be innocent. K.'s plight becomes more and more absurd and confused all the way until the point at which Kafka ceased working on the novel.
That Kafka gave up working on the novel isn't completely surprising. His method of writing was to growth the text like one would a plant, not necessarily knowing where the story was going, but instead allowing it to develop as it wished. Unlike virtually every other great writer of the past two hundred years, Kafka was almost completely unconcerned with either character development or with plot. It wasn't that he was bad at character: it simply didn't concern him. He was far more interested in pure situations, as if they were thought experiments. For instance, what would happen if a man awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into a giant beetle? Or, what would happen if someone were accused of a crime, but knew neither accuser, the crime of which he is being accused, or where his trial was to be held? Or, what would happen if a man showed up in a village to work as a surveyor, but discovered that he had neither a position nor means to contact those who had hired him?
One reading this novel should keep in mind that Kafka spent his entire professional life working as a risk manager in an insurance company. He was acutely aware of the nature of corporate bureaucracy, and the myriad of silly rules and the amount of red tape inundating modern corporate and political life. Some tend towards a metaphysical reading of the novel, and while the book is not immune to such a reading, I think it can be better read on a more concrete social level. Kafka worked in an office his entire adult life, until his tuberculosis forced him to retire on what today would be workers' disability. He knew first hand the degrading, callous, and inhuman nature of the bureaucratic culture that was threatening to engulf modern urban living. Unfortunately, he did not, like K. in the novel, know how to escape the nightmare himself, or give us advice on how we could escape it ourselves.

First, if you don't want to know what happens at the end of the novel, don't read the translator's preface before reading the text. He may be an enthusiastic and exacting translator but not the most sensitive reviewer.
As for Kafka's story, I want to offer a somewhat different interpretation that might perhaps attract readers who are not interested in another despairing man against society theme. I think Kafka is telling us that we are free yet we are obsessed by our accusers and allow them to control us. The bad news is we choose to not to resist but to grumble and suffer subserviently. The good news is we don't have to. The interesting news is what we as a society who reads Kafka will choose to become. Do we read it and say, yep that's the mire we're stuck in? Or do we read it and realize that he is arming us with the power of insight, assertion, and choice in facing our lives.
Don't miss the last 30 pages or so including the chapter titled, "In the Cathedral". The story the priest tells K. and their ensuing discussion is fascinating and still has my mind whirling. If you know what it all means, tell me. Is there a support group for this book?
I must say that the "Fragments" included after the story lent little to my understanding of the whole. If you want more, it's there; if you don't, you wouldn't be missing anything by skipping it.
But don't skip the rest of it, particularly if, on one level, you just want to see a great writer's insights into the labyrinthine constructs of his own legal profession.

I didn't really like _The Metamorphosis _ when I read it about 5 years ago so I thought it was time to give Kafka a try again.
Wrong!
If what he was trying to do was portray the hopelessness/uselessness of bureaucracy then he succeeded but the experience of reading the story was anything but enjoyable. Everyone in the story seems to know about everything that happens in the book and they all take turns analyzing the situation(s) ad nauseum. But none of the theories are ever proved true or untrue, and as many know, the story ends in the middle of a sentence leaving ABSOLUTELY no resolution to the problem.
I guess I'll wait another 5 years and try _The Trial_ or _Amerika_.

Not surprisingly very Kafkaesque, but with a lot of original humor. I'd like to think that while he wrote at least, Kafka was having some fun. Some of the detail even in his most depressing books is as funny as it's poignant.

Translation means everything! Over the years I've read much of Kafka especially during adolescence and into my early twenties when his worldview spoke most directly to my own attempts to understand how the world really worked. Of all his books only The Castle totally defeated me. I must have begun it five times in my life, only to abandon it partway through. Now I know why. It wasn't Kafka. It was the translation.
Mark Harmon's translation brought Kafka close to my ear and heart, the way he used to when I was younger. I could see the darkness of his interiors, feel the cold of his snow covered wind blown exteriors, smell the stale beer of the taproom, taste the small meals and strong coffee served, sense the animal []attractions of his characters. Most of all I could really hear the voices of his people as they simultaneously revealed and concealed themselves through their stories.
Sometimes I laughed out loud. Sometimes my hair stood on end at the dark realities which this book unveils. The Barnabas family stories in particular chilled me. Especially in this time of fear and shunning by powerful majorities of the 'others'in our societies and in the exhaustion of the 'cleansings' and genocides of the last century, the fall of that family made me feel like I was inside a hateful part of our past, present and future.

I've now lived part of my life within bureaucratic organizations, even as an 'official' and I understand as I couldn't as a youth how absolutely Kafka has gotten to the deepest truths about how our power structures work. What it's like to be enmeshed as part of them, and-or to be at their mercy. It is hard to find free space in the world.

I used to think Kafka was a genius and an artist of the highest rank. Now, reading him in an excellent translation I understand that he was also a prophet.

The Trial was not an enjoyable read for me. The dense and surreal prose was arduous and while I can appreciate the effect of the writing and how the style added to the feeling of the scenes I did find it a struggle at times. Many of the scenes are dreamlike with bizarre and strange things happening. I found the bizarreness and randomness made for a heavy-going reading experience.

I'm sure I missed and didn't 'get' what others find so compelling about the book. I imagine that each of the characters that K. meets is an allegory of some element of culture or bureaucracy. I'm sure that if I had worked hard enough I could have found meaning to many of the strange events and characters. There are many interpretations to the book and different readers can find different meanings in the text. For me it was just too tedious to enjoy or want to think about.

It's also worth noting that the book was never completely finished by Kafka - one of the chapters is incomplete and it's uncertain whether Kafka actually intended other chapters to be written. He certainly never got to edit his work so it is rough round the edges as a consequence.

The conclusion that you must reach from The Trial is that mankind does not deserve to exist. We are all, everyone of us, reprobates deserving of the worst kind of death. Kafka left me morbidly depressed for days. No other book has ever affected me so intensely. Yet, I hated it. Be warned that there is no way that you can read this book and not be affected. However, you will not be able to put it down.

The Trial was both the best and worst book that I have ever read. It is not for the faint of heart.

This novel isn't just Kafka's best...it's the best novel of the 20th Century.
"The Trial" takes a surreal premise and drops it in a context so complete (the bizarre details alone make "The Trial" worth reading) that the story feels completely realistic. Picture "1984" with a neurotic streak.
Anyway, read it and prepare to remember it for the rest of your life.

"The trial" is a deeply symbolic novel and opens with the protagonist Joseph K., being arrested by two warders followed by an interview with the inspector. Joseph K. is told that he is under arrest but is free to go about his daily duties. Throughout the first half of the novel, Joseph K. strives at all costs to comprehend why he has been arrested. Although all of his attempts to shed some light on his charges are unsuccessful, he still attempts to mount a defense...claiming innocence. Throughout the novel, the way in which Joseph K. handles his trial compounds his guilt and at the end of the novel he is executed by being stabbed. Throughout the novel, Kafka is ambiguous and leaves many open ends with respect to the point and meaning of the novel. Thus, several interpretations can be made with respect to the significance of the novel. However, focusing on the symbolism inherent in this text, it can be argued that Joseph K. represents every person living and working in modern society and that the trial represents a lifelong process that all humans must endure to some extent. Further, "The Law" represents the laws of nature, God and evil to which all humans are bound. Therefore, Joseph K, representing modern bureaucratic society, breaks "The Law's" of nature/humanity by being morally shallow, self-centered, and superficial and hence must face the trial. However, due to his own failing attempt of searching and finding what he was guilty of and blindly associating himself with innocence, his trial (life's journey of trial and error) was ended, and Joseph K. executed, symbolizing his ultimate fate of death and complete ignorance.
When the novel opens, the narrator explains how Joseph K. routinely receives his breakfast from the cook precisely at 8:00 am. However, there was an interruption to his routine that day. Instead of his breakfast, two guards showed up and after Joseph rang his breakfast bell, the warders notified him that he was under arrest. From that moment, Joseph attempted to find out why he was arrested and what he was being charged with. He stated that he had no knowledge of the law and the guards in reply took that statement as further evidence that he was indeed guilty. Following his arrest, he was instructed by the guards to dress up so that he could meet the investigator. Having met the investigator, Joseph K. realized that he would be equally unhelpful in clarifying why he had been arrested. However, the inspector notified him that he is free to go and return to his daily activities. This gesture symbolizes the need for Joseph K. (society), to focus in on themselves and realize how they have been living their lives and in this case leading it in the wrong direction. As a matter of fact, the court encourages Joseph K. to find out the reasons for his arrest. However, Joseph K. seems to be focusing more on his innocence than on what he has done wrong. In fact, when he appears for his interrogation at the courthouse, instead of attempting to find out what he has done wrong, he criticizes the court, the proceedings and states his innocence. Joseph K., is also easily distracted by small, meaningless details that surround him in daily life. However, rather than pay attention to the details that can help him solve his problem of guilt, he seems distracted by his observations. The inspector's charge that, "Joseph K. is insensitive to the nuances of his situation." This implies that the court is indeed encouraging Joseph to focus on detail, but once again, Joseph K.'s approach to the trial further compounds his problems and both approaches that Joseph uses to prove his innocence fail him as he should be searching for his guilt and is therefore not focused on the appropriate things.
As Joseph K. begins to mount a defense for his trial, he in no way has any idea what he is being charged with, or what he is guilty of . As a matter of fact, he remains focused on his innocence and doesn't even fathom what he could be guilty of. This represents his blindness to his situation. His (societies) defense should have focused on what wrongdoings were done and how they could be avoided in the future at all costs. Instead, the defense showed general stubbornness and apathy to "The Law," and just like the laws of nature in the world we live, in Kaska's, "The Trial," "The Law," is never wrong. Joseph K., while being interrogated at the courthouse, stated that he would fight the court not merely for himself but for all other's indicted. This line has several implications the first being that he is not the only one being accused. Therefore, even in the novel, Joseph is representing not only himself but also all others indicted. The major problem to his statement is that he is fighting an institution that cannot lose. He does not realize that the trial that is being held because he broke the law is a process that all humans must go through. Further, if he freely accepts his wrongdoings, he can in a way win, by being able to go on with life and better himself. However, he constantly chooses to fight the entire process and this leads to his downfall and eventual death.
Throughout the novel, Joseph K. comes across three women. The most important meeting is with his neighbor Frailein Burstner, who warns him to focus on his trial and is also present when he is being dragged to his death. Blindly, Joseph K. only wants to see her in a sexual manor and in the novel wildly kisses her on the lips and neck. This symbolizes his animalistic nature and immorality. Further, as Frailein gives Joseph the invaluable advice of focusing on his trial he only focuses on her and doesn't heed any attention to her warnings. The other two encounters with woman are purely sexual in nature. Joseph K. comes across his lawyer's assistant Leni who wants to be his mistress as well as everyone else's mistress, and the usher's wife also offers herself in a sexual way to Joseph. These latter two women again symbolize immorality. They function to take Joseph's attention off of his trial and what he has done wrong and instead attempt to lead him astray.
This novel can be interpreted in many ways. It is sometimes argued that "The Trial" is a satirical political novel, however, the fact that the defendant is allowed to rest before his interrogation and that he roams freely whilst arrested is a hint that this novel doesn't address the issues of a police state. Further, it can be interpreted as an existential piece that symbolizes the meaninglessness of life and what leads up to one's death. Similarly, it can be argued that this novel depicts the adventures of a paranoid schizophrenic. With the aforementioned analyses that could be attributed to "The Trial," one can imagine the loose ends that Kafka leaves for the reader. However, the symbolism of society, the laws of nature, and Joseph's eventual expulsion from the world seem a more valid argument. Therefore, throughout the entire novel, Joseph K. (society) focused on the wrong thing. When it was brought to Joseph's (societies) attention that he was to be arrested, he reacted by immediately identifying with innocence. This was the identity that made him and makes society feel comfortable. But, instead of claiming innocence, Joseph should have focused more on what "laws" he was breaking and not adhering too. In essence he and society were attempting to go against "The Law" of nature/God and when it was brought to his (societies) attention, he ignored where he had gone wrong and rather blindly focused on what he had NOT done wrong. Therefore Joseph K.'s reaction to his arrest and the way he handled his trial was his (societies) ultimate failure. If Joseph (society) would have abandoned immorality and admitted guilt at the "trial" of life and then turned his (societies) ways around, he (society) may have been allowed to live a meaningful life, rather than facing ultimate death.

What startled me as I read this new translation, 20 years after reading the older one, is irony and humor Kafka suffused in his paranoid narrative. The Trial is my favorite piece of Kafka's fiction, including his shorter works, because it deals with a social reality and not metaphysical metaphor.

The farcical social reality reminds me of Thomas Berger's novels, especially Neighbors, Meeting Evil, and The Houseguest. If you want to read "Kafkaesque" fiction with a light touch set in contemporary America, check out those Berger masterpieces.

This new edition is useful in that it makes some parts of the narrative closer to the original. In other parts, thoughit seems to muddle things. Its hard to acsertain which is better, this is a complex issue which always comes into play when a complex author is translated into another language. I would suggest that people read both editions together, as this novel is rich enough to be rewarding each time.

In Franz Kafka's novel 'The Trial', Joseph K., an upstanding citizen of a civilized state, is arrested in his home on charges that are never disclosed. His accuser is never disclosed, nor is the law explained. The dehumanizing bureaucracy and arcane, corrupt legal process is, despite the bizarre character of Kafka's novel, both comic and chilling. Among other things, 'The Trial' is a warning to good people everywhere who, through their failure to act against usurpations of authority and abuses of power, are complicit in the illegal or unethical actions of those exercising control over their society. Joseph K. is undone as much by his insistence on maintaining perfect decorum and civility as he is by accepting the notion that he has no right or agency to ignore or overcome the ridiculous and immoral process through which he is destroyed. Kakfa's expressed fears remain relevant today even for those who, living in a democratic nation, assume that due legal process guarantees justice, the protection of individual privacy, and subsequent civil liberties.
Copyright 2003 by Brian D. Sadie, executive director, The Joseph K. Foundation. Used by permission.
Also recommended: To Kill A Mockingbird The Unbearable Lightness of Being Catch-22 The Name of the Rose

I giving the book 5 stars, because it's a really good read. Not having read any other translation, I must take other reviewer's word that it compares well. Read the other reviews, they are correct about this books quality.
Now, here's why I am mad. I read the introduction. Then I read the translator's notes. The translator is quite full of himself and his cleverness. Thus he points out the sections where he was particularly clever. In doing so, he gives away the plot, the ending of the novel, and why we should think about it the way he translated it, and not trust earlier transactions.
This should have been an afterward, not before the text. I reviewed the plot, including the ending, before reading the text. This somewhat ruined the experience for me. Skip the translator's notes, and you'll have a fine edition of Kafka's influntial novel.

The Trial is like falling asleep into a splendid deleterious nightmare, with all of the dread and Angst, and never being quite able to find the code to lead oneself out of the intricately spun labyrinth. It surely will be a joy for those capable of opening up to Kafka's complex existential world. It is said that Kafka laughed obstreperously while reading this book. I tried to laugh along with him, but I believe there are a myriad of other approaches to this novella that are just as appropriate. I recommend to all.

The Trial, by Kafka, is superb work only short of masterpiece because it was never finished. I read the book a few months ago, but it still can give me the shivers when I reflect on the brutal, impersonal environment with which K., the main character, is persecuted. When suspected of a crime, the accused must defend themselves but are not revealed the nature of the crime they committed. This is the dark, helpless world K. is subjugated to. Many times the book feels dreamy as if K. could wake up -- but he can't.

I haven't read a Kafka novel before. While reading this, I always find myself internally shouting and complaining about the lack of reason within the book. I complain about Josef K's lack of ability to fight for his situation, but then again I am reminded that this is surrealism at its best. Nothing makes sense in this book. But still, I love it. As long as you are willing to understand that nothing will make sense in this book, then you will enjoy it. If you aren't willing to give up your sense of reason, then don't read this one.

The Trial The Trial by Franz Kafka is one of the greatest marks in the world literature. This book has two main levels of interpretation. One has to do with how social power is based on the possibility of criticism and accusation. The critical or accusatory content is less relevant than the exercise of power in the social life; the possibility of harsh punishment making the power game even more effective. The second level has to do with how someone can be completely dominated by the worries that stem from the accusatory process, Kafka enhances further the engendered personal drama by making the content of the accusation unknown. This power game has existed throughout the whole civilization, however, Franz Kafka with a touch of surrealism makes the awareness of its existence more possible to all human beings.

K: wandering in a world where the ruling class
(hates humans)
encountering a paper trail
endless diversion,
w/ one exception:
A man with all the most high profile illuminati bloodlines inside him (St. Luke, Hesse, Bauer/Rothschild)
can make a deal, can release a viral map to
the solution to
2012.

The way this book ends:

Somebody is guarding the door but if you just wait around long enough
if you just keep waiting
if you just sit by that door
if you stare at that guard all night long and just sit
by that door,

(he will never let you go)

so I did what I could to slip one past the censors, (made a deal)

*(google: individuate church)

Franz Kafka's The Castle is my favorite book. I first read it when I was young at a time when I also read America and The Trial. I enjoyed Mark Harman's excellent translation of the restored text in the autumn of 1999, and I am these days reading the first pages of Villy Sørensen's Danish translation, which to me may very well become the ultimate edition of The Castle. Pretty good for an unfinished work.

The morose and satirical style of Kafka is so powerful that you may find yourself stopping to catch your breath between pages of this stirring and frightening book. "K" is as hauntingly real as any of us, and his situation is also sadly compatible with that of many of us.

Kafka's book is way ahead of its time. I feel that it is as relevant today as it was when it was written. We are all like little ants in a beaurocratic world, paddling against the current.

I also kind of like the fact that the book is incomplete - it reflects the fact that the situation that this mirrors in society is also incomplete and has not been addressed.

Don't get me wrong, no complaints on the service or delivery, when I got the book it was in fair condition.... my rating is only to the actually contents of the book. I think it sucked, complete waste of my time. The writing it is was great but there is no arc, the book was incomplete by Kaftka and it should have left it that way, not try to replicate his work. No one really knows what he was going for or what he had planned for this story and it should had died with him because he's the only one that can finish it.

The Trial is about Josef K., a man who's been charged with a crime, and yet, never been told what it was. He soon realizes he's not fighting a regular court system. The system in which he's involved permits no escaping, there are no aquittles... they are things of legends. The courts system entraps the young man, he realizes there is no escaping, he goes calmly to his execution still not knowing his crime, but being sure this obstacle, this monolith "they" call law is most unjust.

It has been awhile since I read Kafka (the last time was in school) and I have been going back to reread books that I have not read in awhile. Though I remembered he book generally, over time I had forgotten some of the details which made the book fresh again.

I do not recall what the last version was that I read, but I enjoyed this translation. From the moment we meet Josef K we are part of his nightmare and the absurd life around him.

In the end the book was just as dark, confusing and thought provoking as I remember thinking it was when I first read it, which is why it became one of my favorite books.

This book takes you on a journey through a surrealistic dream. Instantly you are reminded of Dali, Kahlo, and other great art works that show you the objects you recognize and seem to understand, but then you find yourself enthralled trying to decipher the meaning of them. You are pulled into the vortex of the unknown and yet dangerously tempted to sort it out for yourself until you realize that the beauty lies in NOT understanding and rather in self reflection.

just like Kafka didn't finish writing this novel, ý haven't finished reading this novel. basic facts- you'll get bored and you'll love to get bored,creates a surreal atmosphere and setting-one which is more real than any other setting in any other book.. It's a challenge to the reader to read the book.. but it doesn't have anything mysterious to do with its title. just sit back and relax..this book cannot be finished in two days. everytime ý read a few pages, ý feel the fragments of existentialism, but not like in an Albert Camus book or a J.P Sartre book. this one is definitely DIFFERENT!!

The Trial is about Josef K., a man who's been charged with a crime, and yet, never been told what it was. He soon realizes he's not fighting a regular court system. The system in which he's involved permits no escaping, there are no aquittles... they are things of legends. The courts system entraps the young man, he realizes there is no escaping, he goes calmly to his execution still not knowing his crime, but being sure this obstacle, this monolith "they" call law is most unjust.

It has been awhile since I read Kafka (the last time was in school) and I have been going back to reread books that I have not read in awhile. Though I remembered he book generally, over time I had forgotten some of the details which made the book fresh again.

I do not recall what the last version was that I read, but I enjoyed this translation. From the moment we meet Josef K we are part of his nightmare and the absurd life around him.

In the end the book was just as dark, confusing and thought provoking as I remember thinking it was when I first read it, which is why it became one of my favorite books.

This book takes you on a journey through a surrealistic dream. Instantly you are reminded of Dali, Kahlo, and other great art works that show you the objects you recognize and seem to understand, but then you find yourself enthralled trying to decipher the meaning of them. You are pulled into the vortex of the unknown and yet dangerously tempted to sort it out for yourself until you realize that the beauty lies in NOT understanding and rather in self reflection.

just like Kafka didn't finish writing this novel, ý haven't finished reading this novel. basic facts- you'll get bored and you'll love to get bored,creates a surreal atmosphere and setting-one which is more real than any other setting in any other book.. It's a challenge to the reader to read the book.. but it doesn't have anything mysterious to do with its title. just sit back and relax..this book cannot be finished in two days. everytime ý read a few pages, ý feel the fragments of existentialism, but not like in an Albert Camus book or a J.P Sartre book. this one is definitely DIFFERENT!!

Well, those are some bizarre reviews already submitted. This is one the the greatest novels ever written. Beautifully written, with many and varied ideas. Anyone who doesn't like it is just plain odd. I suppose the problem is trying to explain the book. It isn't about any one thing. It's about everything. The whole world in a book. (One of maybe 5 books from the 20th century like that.) If you're not sure, then start with The Metamorphosis, a perfect work of art, and it's short, too, and easy to read. Fun for the whole family.

A haunting tale of life and struggle. An introduction to dystopian literature that is so popular today. The creation of a dark universe and its obscure surviving conditions. Not easy to read, but you can’t stop reading it.

The Trial is a book that draws you into its sea of words and never lets you rise back up to the surface. Once immersed in its content, you do not want to place it back down until you have finished it. "The Trial," is about man enslaved trying to become truly free. It is about the cruelty of life and man's failure in trying to find some importance, some meaning, some salvation that is inaccessible in the physical world.

"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested." So begins the Trial. This book for its opening line would get five stars, for story - five stars, for the depictions of scenes - five stars, for every piece in and among itself this book should get five stars. I love the feeling I get when I read it. The totalitarian government, the bureaucratic and surreal nature of the situation, the helplessness of the the protagonist, I love it all. Everything the five star rating crowd on this forum said is absolutely true, and even understated. I had never any Kafka before this and went to get the Metamorphosis after watching District 9, and for whatever reason I got this one instead.

By the time you get to this review, you have probably read most of the others. As somebody who liked this book, the one thing the five star crowd does not tell you is this is a hard read. The story proper is 231, pages not lengthy by any stretch, the language is about as simple as I could ask for, you could finish this in six or so hours. I took it in two chunks of four hours each night. But looking back, it felt a bit like playing World of Warcraft: the beginning was a breeze - even fun, then around level 25 (or page 50, here) you get to the journey and the meat of the story, then at some point it becomes work. Not fun anymore, you just want to get to the end and see what happens. At more than one point, I actually felt like the 60-70 level grind through the Burning Crusade and like when I just about gave up Warcraft, this was literally the hardest book I have actually finished. One other minor thing, such as one other night over the one I chose to read this, I would have given up.

Who would I recommend this to? Actually a lot of people, as i said in the beginning, this is a book that in all aspects is great: its just there is something missing in the sum of all the parts. Literally, I loved everything about it, except reading it. It may be the translation that sucks. So let's start with who I would not recommend it to, that list is shorter. The casual reader probably should skip this. If you like weird mind screws like two men getting flogged in a vault, it is a great scene early on, then you would like this, it only gets better from there, as Josef starts to descend into the plot.

It is strange to say, this is the only book I would that I am proud that I finished, and will definitely pick up some more of his work especially Metamorphosis, and the Castle. I have I feeling that it will be well worth it, like Wrath of the Lich King made all the work of Burning Crusade worth it. Send my regards to Cataclysm.

I welcome Mr. Mitchell's work to the literary table. His translation of the masterwork is a crisp one. His skill is reflected best in the central character, the terribly over-accused and often hungry Joseph "K". While other translators have spoon-fed us simple serial descriptions, Mitchell does far more. Indeed, Breon Mitchell's K is a special K, and one I will long remember.

I wonder why the term "Kafkian Complexity" has never been coined (to my knowledge that is)in this era where complexity and chaos are in vogue..

I would suggest to read Systemantics by John Gall (see my review) as a complement to this dense (superb) novel.. I would suggest listening to some Mark Isham incidental music as a background too.

The reviews on this page refer to the newest edition and translation of The Castle, but the publication being advertised on this page is the old, error-filled Muir translation. Look inside the book and check the copyright information to avoid ordering by error. I made the mistake of ordering from this page and received the Muir translation, which I already had in an older printing.

A text, not so much a critque of religious institutions, as an analysis of the telescopic nature of human perception. Given the magnitude of importance assigned to each event by individuals within the novel, we are painted a magnificant portrait of perception. From the chamber maid who's life is given new hope by the arrival of the "land survayor" to K himself.

Because it's unfinished, it comes across more as a manuscript or rough draft than an actual novel. In The Metamorphasis and The Trial, Kafka focused on the main characters, but here he drones on and on about the ins and outs and the over all maze-like beaurocracy (sp?) of the castle. It gets redundant. And if that's not bad enough, a civil servant lectures the hero in full blown metafictional hogwash about the mechanics of castle politics for a whole chapter, while the hero, Josph K, is super tired, and just wants to fall asleep! I feel your pain, dude. The version i read had no ending and stopped mid sentence.

Kafka is one of my all time favorite writers, but try as I might, I can't get through the Mark Harman translation of The Castle ... it comes across like a laundry list of details, at least compared to the other versions I've read.
A tour de force of literal accuracy, perhaps, but it just isn't funny.

Although I think many of the positive reviews accurately described this book, I felt like I got the point after one or two hundred pages. Certainly, this book describes how incomprehensible and annoying bureaucracy can be - but it wasn't all that readable.

The item called "The Castle (Paperback) by Franz Kafka (Author), David Fishelson (Editor), Aaron Leichter (Editor), Max Brod (Editor)" for $7.50 is NOT the novel The Castle by Franz Kafka. It is a play by Aaron Leichter and David Fishelson based on a dramatization of the novel by Max Brod. If you think you are buying the book by Kafka, you will find you are mistaken. I am not commenting on the play itself; I'm just letting you know that this is NOT the novel. It is misrepresented. Its actual title is "Franz Kafka's The Castle," which was obviously not written by Franz Kafka in this form.

I did not actually purchase this book. Why am I reviewing it and giving it a horrible rating then you might ask? Certainly not due to the writing of Franz Kafka. I absolutely love Kafka's literary genius!...I am raging it because the seller spoils the entire f***ing story in the product description!!! Seriously, the man who is one of my favorite authors wrote less than 3 full novels in his lifetime and when I am finally about to purchase and read the final one left, it is ruined for me by your product description?! That's outrageous. Though I am still intent on reading it, your company sure doesn't have my business! Hope Barnes & Nobles has an edition in stock or online. So baffled by this experience just now...

It is a pity that it wasn't until the book's abrupt end that my interest finally piqued. So many questions unanswered. Disappointed with the verbosity and seemingly needless details throughout most of the book, I was suddenly left facing the cliff hanger of all cliff hangers! The author is dead! I will never have my pressing questions answered! It makes me wonder whether Kafka actually meant to do this. Very sneaky indeed!
I know that K. must be Kafka, but what is the Castle? Acceptance as a Jew in Nazi Germany? It seems too obvious, but perhaps a simple explanation will suffice.

This book is filled entirely with nonsense. It contradicts itself and spends a great deal of time saying things that mean absolutely nothing. Actions are random and meetings are futile. At least the characters are interesting and the ending is predictable. Would I read more by this author? Nah. Would I recommend this book to others? Yeah probably. It was recommended to me by a friend. May as well pass it on.

See the full review on my blog, Awesome Book Assessment: http://www.awesomebookassessment.com/2014/08/book-review-trial-franz-kafka.html

The Trial tells the story of a half balding post office clerk who questions his own existence after having lost an eye in a terrible tram accident. Terrifying, for its vivid portrayl of office clerks in Vienna in 1908, this story follows the realist tradition of many great writers. Fred, who is a middle aged man with dementia and an unknown skin disease, imagines a life away from the crumbling empire, which is about to enter World War 1 but he can not get away from the post office because of his stamp licking addiction. Great scene includes when he smashes a portrait of the king on the floor, realizing it was actually a painting by Renoir and when he imitates a squirrel in the park.

Perhaps when it was first published in 1926, two years after the author's death, "The Castle" must have been seen as something wondrous and mythic, and readers must have had heated discussions over its meaning. In his introduction to the Everyman edition, the English critic Irving Howe discusses how this labyrinthe tale of a man named K. who's trying to find his place in the labyrinthe bureaucracy that is the Castle is a metaphor for the individual's religious alienation: K. relentlessly and desperately seeks to confirm his faith in God. I think that's a fair interpretation, but a more accurate interpretation would have been to take the author literally. Mr. Howe has never worked in a bureaucracy because he would at once recognize the inverted nonsensical logic, the instinctive mechanical fanatical devotion to detail and form and protocol, the perverse crushing of the human will and spirit, a nebulous and abstract and hidden overwhelming power to be the trademarks of a bureaucracy.

K. is a land surveyor who has been hired by the Castle, and when he arrives in a village to await his commission he is instead thrown into bureaucratic limbo. For the rest of the book (there's an endless debate as to when the book ends, if not that K.'s search and confusion never end) K tries to contact the Castle authorities, and confirm his professional identity. He is confounded at every turn, and is toyed with, even being forced to work as a janitor. If this sounds a bit too metaphysical, abstract, and somewhat pointless it's because the novel really is.

I felt like K., and I desperately tried to look for something concrete to hold onto and confirm my identity as a reader of something relevant and important. Where is this novel going? Is Kafka toying with me? Does this novel actually exist? The novel reads like a nightmare, and after struggling to finish it (I found myself skimming pages, a bad habit I try to avoid) I awoke to found the nightmare to be irrelevant and pointless.

The most boring and depressing book ever written. K is not an hero , not even an antihero . At the end , he go out through the back door in being assimilated to the timid hotelkeeper . If only we knew a little more about other more charismatic characters as Momus , Sortini or ( let's talk frankly! ) as the captivating Klamm ...

The only strong point of the book remains the understanding that Kafka had already in his time of the power relations . Patients and intelligent readers can continue to minutely analyze the relationships K tries to weave throughout the narrative. Vain and stubborn work like literature itself.

The opening sentence is the only thing I found interesting about this Novel. After the second chapter I get sick of the Qestions followed by almost next to no answers. I will try this book again when I am 30.

A bitter satire on bureaucracy, lacking narrative, character growth, conclusion, chapter order, or point besides baffling the reader, this "novel" progressively diminishes for lack of material of substance into a sordid series of romantic machinations revolving around accommodations, paperwork, and power, pride, and prestige.

Most avoidable novel of the twentieth century. Published against the author's deathbed wishes by a traitorous friend Max Brod, who profiteered on his dead friend's miserable scribblings.

All in all, sinkhole of non-integrity.

Ah ha!! Just to catch your attention, This novel is a ***** stars. A mind opener for every artist and surrealism fan out there, based on realistic social behavior and man made complex conditions upon himself overfed into detailed nightmarish perspectives from the subconscious. *****