Allen's review
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Damn good book, but an incomplete work of art in my view - it's a shame the author didn't see it through to publication - this work had the potential to achieve true aesthetic satisfaction, but in the end, it falls short. A maddening treatment of guilt, combining nightmare with the banal, the book depicts Joseph K's slow and fixed self-implication in the guilty charge he has been delivered by emissaries of the Court. In the end, this book is an unsettled testament to life in the early 20th Century, driving home an existentialist theme in the last pages of sovereignty over one's own mind, precipitating Huis Clos and L'Etranger and others.
