jon's review
The Trial by Franz Kafka
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 does not make that circumstance central. Streets, corridors, hallways, cramped rooms whose inhabitants have to duck just to fit inside, all emerge almost haphazardly, and all lead somewhere else equally haphazard, never back to a central point that would organize the labyrinth (I'm beginning to think that Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufmann had Kafka in mind when they made "Being John Malkovich"). The lack of a center or any kind of stable point of reference extends beyond space to more...more
