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Jan 14, 2011

Manny rated it:

The tortured bureaucratic world described in The Trial always strikes me as startlingly modern. I wondered

How The Trial might have started if Kafka had been an academic writing in 2010

K's latest conference paper had been rejected, and now he sat in front of his laptop and read through the referees' comments. One of them, evidently not a native speaker of English, had sent a page of well-meaning advice, though K was unsure whether he understood his recommendations. The sec More...

7 comments like (23 people liked it)

Oct 09, 2011

Joselito rated it:

Look at Joseph K., a bank officer living in a country with a constitution. He wakes up one day with strange men in his apartment telling him he's under arrest. Why or for what offense, no one knows. The arresting officers themselves don't know and can't tell him. Even if he's under arrest, however, no one picks him up or locks him in jail. He can still go to his office, work, perform his customary daily chores, and do whatever he wants to do as he awaits his trial. But he is understandably anxio More...

7 comments like (14 people liked it)

Apr 09, 2011

Kinga rated it:

Kafka's Trial is one of those books that are always present in cultural sphere and referenced ad nauseum. Despite never having read Kafka before I am quite sure I used the word 'Kafkaesque' on many occasions and maintained a semi-eloquent conversation about 'The Trial'.
I could've probably done without ever reading it but recently I resolved to take my literary pursuits seriously and since books seem to be the only thing in this world I truly care for I might as well take it to another leve More...

6 comments like (20 people liked it)

Feb 25, 2009

Holly rated it:

Sometimes when book bothers me, I read more by the same auther to develope my sense of the author's style and personality. This book, however, did the opposite, after finishing it I had the same thought, "this is brillian but why does the author write such fantastical situations." I finally "get" this guys genius after I read a quote in a book I am reading now that says, "all good fiction does not necessarily depict reality as much as it uncovers truth." FINALLY, More...

0 comments like (20 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2009

Rauan rated it:

really enjoyed. every one talks about Kafka's mazes, the huge and terrifying machine of society, etc, etc,... but what really makes this book happen for me is the humor and the sexually charged episodes (sometimes intertwined...)

things are hopeless, here. but the individual, frivolous and laughable, is still fraught with needs and vanity.

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 25, 2011

David rated it:

This was one of Kafka's works that was published posthumously by Kafka's friend despite his request that all of his unpublished writings be burned unread after his death. It is a satiric and symbolic tale of a man who mysteriously finds himself arrested and on trial one day. He can't figure out what exactly he's on trial for, and the mysterious court that is judging him is complex and surreal and unfathomable.

There were some really good things Kafka had going on here, but I just was More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 02, 2011

Ben rated it:

After reading the first sentence, I distrusted the narrator.

Third-person narrators tell the story but are rarely expected to think; express their own ideas and reasoning capabilities. They possess omniscient and omnipresent characteristics but should have no agency to answer conundrums. The narrator of The Trial immediately considers the possible reasons for K's arrest and informs the reader of his conclusion. This automatically beckons the reader to question whether the narrator is More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 09, 2011

Chantal rated it:

Kafkaesque, as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition) refers to “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre or illogical quality”. Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, is the ultimate Kafkaesque story; the original (written before his death in 1924); the story that gave coinage to the word. As for its contribution on the whole, this novel, for its nightmarish narrative and bizarre plot, is considered a forerunner in existential literature.
On the morning More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 13, 2010

Tjellow rated it:

My first Kafka. Liked the book. Everything starts out completely normal untill you start figuring out things aren't at all what they seem to be. Although I haven't the clue what some events/occasions are synonymous with I did figure out some... At least I finished the book thinking I did.
Then it struck me that pherhaps the whole Kafka mythos made me look for things behind things while it may well could have been just an ordinary story about a bank employee embrodied in a curious trial.
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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 05, 2011

Austin rated it:

On September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka stayed up all night writing a highly autobiographical, somewhat fantastical, short story called “The Judgment.” Twelve years later he was dead. He had published little, but what he’d written in that decade—including “In the Penal Colony,” “The Metamorphosis,” and The Trial—was a thunderbolt staked in the heart of literature unlike any since Boccaccio’s Decameron.

From Boccaccio (and Dante and Petrarch) emanates that realist, psychological humanism More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 28, 2008

Daniel rated it:

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 muc More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Oct 01, 2007

K Shawn rated it:

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 fo More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 25, 2007

jon rated it:

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...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Wendy rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 19, 2008

Haines rated it:

"The Trial" is funny. If you read it as a comedy, it's not only more entertaining, it's far more frightening. Dark Comedy. The moral of the story, to elaborate a cliche', is that it's only futile to resist when you have no idea what you're resisting. We never know what K did wrong, and neither did he, and the whole thing is just an absurd mystery that literally trips itself up sentence by sentence. There are banana peels strewn all over this book and the slapstick is existential rather More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 22, 2012

Artemisia rated it:

Leggere Kafka è compiere un'esperienza mentale: ci si sente oggetto di una persecuzione continua compiuta da un potere anonimo e attuata da strane coppie di "vecchi attori" poco credibili e poco ufficiali. Kafka è l'inventore di un nuovo tipo di sovrannaturale capace di comunicare ansia e disagio senza precludere una possibile lettura comica (alla lettura dei suoi testi si racconta che gli amici ridessero a crepapelle).
Il processo - nella traduzione assolutamente magnifica di Primo Lev More...

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Nov 18, 2011

Filipe rated it:

O Processo, é uma obra de Franz Kafka, escritor checo que tem uma maravilhosa obra escrita que o qualifica como uma dos maiores génios literários do século XX.
Esta obra conta a estória de Josef K., funcionário de um banco, que se vê confrontado com um processo, sendo os contornos desse processo, o tema da narrativa.
Durante todo o livro, K., desenvolve todos os esforços para encontrar uma solução para o problema em que se viu envolvido. Entra dentro de um labiríntico sistema processua More...

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Aug 09, 2011

Ryan added it

Upon first read, The Trial seems like the usual Kafka indictment against modernization and bureaucracy. In fact one might be tempted to say that Franz regurgitates most of the thematic elements of Modernist literature. One man; striving against his destiny; facing a system that alienates him and turns him into an animal reads like any other short story/novel by Kafka or most modernist writers. Josef K.-the ultimate cog in the machine-recognizes his limits of power through his own trial. A tri More...

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Jan 19, 2012

Meagan rated it:

Read more of my reviews at: http://meagan-maguire.blogspot.com/

The Trial is a book you either love or hate. Kafka himself would prefer you hate it. Before his death in 1924 Kafka begged his longtime friend Max Brod to burn all of his writings. This request was not honored, but it reflects how Kafka thought about his own writing. He was a depressed, angry man driven to write but hating his works. Thus The Trial was born, which is perhaps the strangest autobiography ever written.
More...

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Jan 10, 2012

Stephen rated it:

So much has been said about Kafka's The Trial that almost any comment seems superfluous and even a bit silly. Still, I will confess to being surprised upon returning to this novel after my first reading probably thirty years ago. First, it is far less tightly structured than I had remembered--in some ways it possesses the very chaos of the judicial process it parodies. While I recognize the genius behind this work, it is not a page-turner (nor should it be). Second, to reduce The Trial to a More...

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Jan 09, 2012

Bruce rated it:

The thirty-year-old bank executive Joseph K. awakens one morning to find himself under arrest, having done nothing that he thinks is wrong. The two policemen who have come to arrest him offer no explanations. The ambiance of the story is peculiar, and it is hard to know whether this is a satire on bureaucracy, a psychological study, a fantasy, or a dream sequence. There are continual ambiguities and incongruities, and logic is entirely lacking. Maybe one way of reading this story is as a par More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 01, 2011

Fifo rated it:

This book made me a Kafka fan. Unlike The Metamorphosis it doesn't really use surrealism, however like The Metamorphosis The Trial uses a very dry, neutral and descriptive language. In fact it goes much further.

Kafka being a Naturalist describes the bad, depressing side of society, without using any kind of emotion. This allows or even force the reader to open oneself to the story in a completely unbiased way. Even the main character is described in an emotionless way. The focus lies o More...

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Aug 23, 2011

Sylvia rated it:

The Doorkeeper Parable:
In front of the law there is a doorkeeper. A man from the countryside comes up to the door and asks for entry. But the doorkeeper says he can't let him in to the law right now. The man thinks about this, and then he asks if he'll be able to go in later on. 'That's possible,' says the doorkeeper, 'but now now.' The gateway to the law is open as it always is, and the doorkeeper has stepped to one side, so the man bends over to try and see in. When the doorkeeper notice More...

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Jul 26, 2011

Matti rated it:

This was the first Kafka that I've read. He was described to me as some sort of a lunatic, but I think his writing is very clear, almost sterile, free of emotion, as if written by an engineer, if you'll pardon the expression. But after finishing the book I realized what they meant. It's the story itself that is twisted, not the way that it is delivered. The story sure is strange, but maybe not to the extent I had feared/hoped for.

Kafka's descriptions of things are very elaborate and More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Benjamin rated it:

This is the book I have re-read, puzzled over and thought about more than any other book. A few stray thoughts:

I think that the point of the bureaucracy is not that it is a bureaucracy but that it is unknowable and inaccessible. Yes, the story involves a legal system, but it is not about the legal system. It is about Joseph K, and more broadly, what happens to a person when they are up against a system that they cannot understand and cannot conquer. Kafka happened to be a German-sp More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 11, 2011

Jen rated it:

The first time I tried to read this book I was so bored by it that I put it down and moved on to something else. Quite honestly I must have been on drugs. This was a simple yet amazing story that can be approached from so many angles. It starts out simply, Josef K wakes up and something is amiss. He soon learns that he is under investigation for some unspecified crime, and what's more is that Josef is a respectable bank manager and can think of no crime he may have committed.

The leisu More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 24, 2011

Adelka rated it:

The Trial by Franz Kafka was such a strange book! I enjoyed it very much, but I don´t think I really understood much of it.
The story is about a young (30) man Josef K. who works in a bank and is accused of a crime. However, we are not told what the crime is, and neither is he. That´s where the confusion starts. The trial leaks into every aspect of his life and makes no sense. The young gentleman is forced by his uncle to employ a advocate for his case, but this advocate does not seem to be More...

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Apr 26, 2011

Randilyn rated it:

The Trial is very Alice in Wonderland-ish: the physical universe of the novel is upside down and backwards--it's a dream-like space where space and time are warped. It really does feel like a dream where weird things happen but we and Josef K accept them because they become our reality. At no point in the novel do we ever learn why Josef K was arrested. The law is vague, arbitrary, inaccessible, self-contradictory, and ubiquitous all at the same time. It seems as though its only purpose is t More...

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Mar 11, 2011

Non-Horror Reader Survey rated it:

I'm sure that those not haven't read much horror are surprised by this Spotlight. Kafka has influenced much of the literary world. But to say that a story of his is a horror story, I'm sure there are few trying to hold back the "blasphemous." And I'm not that surprised. I bet there are even those that would say "The Metamorphosis" is more horror than The Trial. And then I would remind those people that for a very long time, horror was as much about psychological horror as it More...

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Feb 03, 2011

Hellera rated it:

Short essay for school:

Franz Kafta „Protsess“

Vaimulik ütleb Josef K.-le: „Kohus ei taha sinult midagi. Ta võtab sind vastu, kui sa tuled, ja laseb sul minna, kui sa lähed.“

Kas see tähendab seda, et tegelikult võiks K. lihtsalt Kohtust minema jalutada? Kui K. oleks suutnud oma mõistuse vabaks anda, mitte küll eitada seda, mida talle räägiti, aga ka mitte seda uskuda, äkki oleks ta juhtum siis lõpetatud. Niisama lihtsalt, kui see algas.

Vaimuliku pool-ju More...

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