The Trial
by Franz Kafka
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
anyone interested in bizarre situations of dizzying anxiety
This may be the strangest book I have ever read. What can I say - it was Kafkaesque! I never knew what the trial was about, but I always thought it was about, well, a trial. It turns out - and I'm not spoiling it for you, because this is clear in the beginning - that Josef K. doesn't know what the trial is about either.
Sometimes it's hard in German for me to be sure I have the tone right, but much of this book is dream/nightmare-like, not unlike Die Verwandlung. I can't say that I got much ou...more
Sometimes it's hard in German for me to be sure I have the tone right, but much of this book is dream/nightmare-like, not unlike Die Verwandlung. I can't say that I got much ou...more
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Read in April, 2007
The form of this novel is startling: Kafka begins with neither a setting (a possible world in which actions can proceed in a logical and realistic manner) nor a character (a subject of actions which proceed from something like "personality" or "character"), but with what I will call, for lack of a better term, a "circumstance." Joseph K., about whom we know nothing, is arrested. Events and space itself develop and diverge from this circumstance, but in a way that ...more
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Read in April, 2008
Wow. One odd, haunting book. Fascinating concepts, brilliant details. A hard read for those who like a good narrative structure -- the book is dreamlike and many passageways in this story lead to dead ends, but my goodness, what gargoyles you see on your way!
"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning." That's the first line. Joseph knows he is on trial, but does not know for what: he continues his r...more
"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning." That's the first line. Joseph knows he is on trial, but does not know for what: he continues his r...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
All
Reading Kafka is what I imagine it would be like to listen while someone narrated their own dream if one had such coherent dreams. The environments within Kafka's stories are always eerie and established just to the point of being dream-like, but the situations in "The Trial" are a lot more physically aware than the ones in his other unfinished novel "The Castle." For example there is a scene where he is in the lobby attic of the court house and he is being suffocated by th...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
Anyone with the time and who doesn't mind reading senselessness
This book was really good. I started to skip over the introduction, like usual, but a few phrases caught my attention and made me go back and actually read it. Kafka died before the Nazis ever came to power in Germany, but The Trial was forbidden to be published. Part of the reason for this was that Kafka was a Jew. The Nazis did allow a couple of Jewish publishers to continue printing works by Jews, so that the Jewish community may have something to read (how nice!), but they eventually ban...more
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Read in September, 2007
Yes. With The Trial, Kafka manages to build up a compelling case for his being the man. I'm going to have to also read The Castle. Actually, I'm sort of embarrassed that I hadn't already read The Trial, it had been on my list for a long long time, but it always kept getting pushed down the list by other things. But I'm glad I finally got around to it--a more or less perfect expression of my own distaste for bureaucracy. I still think people who use the word "kafkaesque" are really pret...more
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Read in December, 2007
This is either a very simple book or a very complicated book, depending on what you want to make of it. In the end, I liked it but I struggled with parts of it to keep my interest and found the style and pace not to my liking. However, I can see how a story such as this could keep a college literature class going for a couple of weeks in deep discussion. There are many ways in which to interpret it -- (1) a philosophical attack on the law and the justice system (including all the players in t...more
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This book is, at times, delightfully detailed and tedious, stimulating a perverse desire for inane details in the reader.
Underlying its depiction of mundane, narcissistic details of the life of K, the main character, is the ongoing spectre of his trial. Strangely, though he is on trial, he is not imprisoned and his arrest is simply a house arrest that is over in a matter of hours. He finds the mechanisms of the legal system that has accused him scattered in bureacratic havens above and beh...more
Underlying its depiction of mundane, narcissistic details of the life of K, the main character, is the ongoing spectre of his trial. Strangely, though he is on trial, he is not imprisoned and his arrest is simply a house arrest that is over in a matter of hours. He finds the mechanisms of the legal system that has accused him scattered in bureacratic havens above and beh...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in February, 1999
recommends it for:
Citizens Everywhere
Tell Congress:
(1) Immediate repeal of the "Protect America Act of 2007" enacted in August.
(2) Immediate impeachment of Alberto Gonzales for lying to Congress when he testified under oath that there was no "serious disagreement" inside the Justice Department over the illegal program, even though then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and his top aides dramatically threatened to resign over the program.
(3) Immediate impeachment of George Bush for violating FISA over 40...more
(1) Immediate repeal of the "Protect America Act of 2007" enacted in August.
(2) Immediate impeachment of Alberto Gonzales for lying to Congress when he testified under oath that there was no "serious disagreement" inside the Justice Department over the illegal program, even though then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and his top aides dramatically threatened to resign over the program.
(3) Immediate impeachment of George Bush for violating FISA over 40...more
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Read in October, 2007
Franz Kafka is one of those daunting figures in the world of 20th century letters, and one I've been a bit frightened to approach. However, stranded in a formerly Russian city in the north of China (Harbin) with little to no books in English available, I jumped at the chance to read this translation of The Castle when I found it in a giant bookstore.
What I found was a pleasantly tedious surprise in the story of a land surveyor, K., who arrives in a strange town where everything has a ...more
What I found was a pleasantly tedious surprise in the story of a land surveyor, K., who arrives in a strange town where everything has a ...more
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در رئاليسم کافکا بر عکس رئاليسم ماکسيم گورکی ايده ئولوژی نويسنده نقشی ندارد و کافکا با قصد و نظری سياسی اين کتاب را ننوشته است و کافکا بر عکس گورکی درمسائل سياسی دخالت نمی کرد و اصولا شخص سياسی نبود
لوکاچ فيلسوف و جامعه شناس مجاری در کتاب رئاليسم خود پس ار تعريف و تمجيد فراوا...more
لوکاچ فيلسوف و جامعه شناس مجاری در کتاب رئاليسم خود پس ار تعريف و تمجيد فراوا...more
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This is a book about original sin. Only here, we are not only guilty in the eyes of the Lord, we are also guilty in the eyes of the Law. With the Trial, Kafka describes how deeply rooted paranoia and anxiety manifest themselves politically through judiciary and penal systems, as well as religeously through Christianity. The irony is that once the fear begets a system to control it, the system in turn perpetuates the fear. The system feeds off of the fear. Once again the serpent eats its tail. Th...more
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Quintissential Kafka, apparently prompted by an unexpected interrogation in a Berlin hotel room re his intentions re Felice, conducted by her and a couple of friends. Officials of a vague and unspecified court arrest K for an unspecified crime - but he never queries the charge. An endless stream of futile investigations and obscure legal practices ensue. A metaphor for exploring the meaning (or otherwise) of life, the burden of duty, and struggling to find salvation aided by the intercessions of...more
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Read in May, 2007
recommends it for:
people who read banned books
Despite its being a little slow, I was really surprised with this book and at the last page I continued my love for Kafka. Like Kafka's other books it speaks out about injustices of the bourgeois and the government as a whole as well as the control they can take. it is very powerful but unlike Kafka's other works the message is not as subtile such as it is in the Metamorphosis. I finished the book at a particular time when i was working on a simulation bill to dissassemble the Patriot Act. I st...more
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Read in January, 1985
When I was in high school - 11th grade, I think, we were assigned a big English project: choose any author, read everything you can find by said author, report back. In an effort to distinguish myself from the masses, I chose an author whom I figured was obscure and utterly unknown to my highschool compatriots: Franz Kafka. I loved this book and also The Castle. Loaded with religious motifs. God is completely inaccessible and all that jazz. That was during my extended Hopelessness and Despair Ye...more
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Read in March, 2007
From start to finish there is the sense of absurdity -- his arrest for something he knows nothing about and a legal system that seems entirely inaccessible or almost non-existent. The absurdity of it made it difficult to get into the book through the first few chapters and even through the middle -- but the payoff (which was very rewarding to me) comes in the final three chapters when K. encounters Block and then the prison chaplain and Kafka's criticism of the Law becomes clear. The book appe...more
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While many pigeon-hole Kafka as somewhat cynically pointing out the uselessness of struggling against a world that will consistently kick you in the balls no matter what, I take this novel as a reminder that you're only as much of a victim as you allow yourself to be. Joseph K. acknowledged the court's authority over him. He allowed them to destroy him.
Now I'm not saying this book is some anarchist manifesto recommending we burn down government buildings. But it is saying that we sometimes len...more
Now I'm not saying this book is some anarchist manifesto recommending we burn down government buildings. But it is saying that we sometimes len...more
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Read in August, 2007
Having seen the Orson Welles film, I was intrigued to read the book. Welles' take was beautifully anonymous and moody. This was my first time reading Kafka, so I was surprised to find the book was published posthumously.
The density of the ideas and how they where postulated did not disappoint. As a narrative, it could be trying at times to keep everything working together. Some chapters are very strong, others you wonder why they are there. Perhaps some Kafka scholar can delve out the layer...more
The density of the ideas and how they where postulated did not disappoint. As a narrative, it could be trying at times to keep everything working together. Some chapters are very strong, others you wonder why they are there. Perhaps some Kafka scholar can delve out the layer...more
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Read in November, 2007
Kafka's Trial is a gripping novel that tells the story of Joseph K. K is suddenly arrested without reason. This book is a classic because one can read it many times and constantly have new questions and discover new concepts. For example, is K innocent? Kafka tells us that the law is attracted to guilt. This book fills the reader with questions that Kafka does not come close to answering. Instead he leaves it to the reader. This is a disturbing and bizarre novel. One interesting thing to n...more
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Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
those people
i started this book while I was in prague this summer, and after reading the metamorphasis. They were obviously similar in tone, but this one was less engaging. this is by no means a universiality, but for me it was so. I thought the metamorphasis was almost playing with me, while the trial simply played at me.
I give this a solid 3, but no more. It was a good book, don't get me wrong, but it was sustainable becuase I was in prague, because i wanted it to be, and because it was weird. ...more
I give this a solid 3, but no more. It was a good book, don't get me wrong, but it was sustainable becuase I was in prague, because i wanted it to be, and because it was weird. ...more
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