The Trial in Never too Late to Read Classics

Dec 10, 2011 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it it was amazing

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A magnificent work that nearly suffocates the reader. Brilliant and maddening, it is anything but easy or quick (at only 270 or so pages) and doesn't pander to the reader but rather demands, and if you stick to it, raises the reader up to its level of ideas and power.

While it is true that I'm a fan of Kafka and that this review could potentially be labelled biased, I can at least partially alleviate that by stating that this book was, really without exaggeration, an incredible bitch to get throu A magnificent work that nearly suffocates the reader. Brilliant and maddening, it is anything but easy or quick (at only 270 or so pages) and doesn't pander to the reader but rather demands, and if you stick to it, raises the reader up to its level of ideas and power.

While it is true that I'm a fan of Kafka and that this review could potentially be labelled biased, I can at least partially alleviate that by stating that this book was, really without exaggeration, an incredible bitch to get through. Kafka's idiosyncratic german is well represented by an equally dense and labyrinthine translation that shows the paradoxically vast sparseness of the world of 'The Trial' while making every chapter, every page, every paragraph and even down to the level of sentences and words an arduous pain in the ass labor to go through...and inevitably, go through again as the rereading of passages, for me at least, was a necessity in order to extract as much meaning as possible from the paradoxically verbose sparseness.

And it's just that overly detailed sparseness, that seemingly distracted narrative eye, and the weaving of an atmosphere so suffused with a bewilderingly bleak sense of dread and latent rage that make this not only a fractious work of brilliance but also a consummate manifesto of not only the modern man, but more specifically the modern artist lost in a world not only not 'his' but also not even remotely human. One of the central ironies in that is of course that the entire world in the trial, every bureaucratic ritual and custom is the result of mans invention.

The interpretations of this work are endless as are the potential readings that can be taken from it. What little I can piece together of my own reading experience of the book can be summarized as thus: Kafka has created a work that is funny in its tragedy, epic in is banality, but overall as cold and indifferent as the world it itself depicts. The genius is in the protagonist Joseph K's ambling, stumbling, and finally (spoiler) falling and eventual consuming by the world of the court is a chilling, enraging, and depressing, as well as occasionally hysterical series of events due to the characters scurrying around to make something of their individual existences (at times like a stage play or even an out and out farce) for no other reason than if they were to do otherwise would to be immobile which in this novel seems to be equated with taking death too soon as opposed to living it out to is bitter and boring end.

Kafka's world in The Trial is a bureaucratic and inhuman nightmare that appears to need human beings only tangentially, in other words, a self sustaining machine much like what Orwell would describe later in his 1984. But where Orwell's concern with the individual crushed by the boot of the totalitarian regime seemed broader and more focused on the interplay between the 'them' and the 'one', Kafka shows the them and one in the same universe where, "like dogs" they fend for themselves. Here, the nihilism inherent in the work can be expounded on, a little.

Nietzsche's ideas concerning nihilism are definitely one of the blood streams running in the veins of this work, but not in the all too simple 'life and the universe are meaningless' sense nor in the 'in this lack of meaning there is triumph' sense (though Camus in his 'Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays") makes a thoroughly convincing argument for the latter but Kafka, to me with my honestly very limited impressions, takes a third option. The universe is indifferent in its lack of understanding and in being understood. Man in his creation of bureaucratic institutions like the court, the church, the general idea of work and hierarchy, or more specifically how the day to day activities of these institutions are run with the people employed, is simultaneously trying to imitate the universe and even alleviate some of the abuse given it by enacting the illogical trials and irrational punishments on its fellow human beings. All of this is futile of course but the final genius of Kafka is that this message once depicted doesn't come off to me as grandly tragic or grandly heroic, or even grandly anything. What we are given in this work is a statement about how the world is without judgment. A flawed man (spoiler) dies due to the judgment of other flawed men in this flawed scheme in a universe that serves mostly as wallpaper for all the events that occur.

But we have the unknown shore, we have death, and other aspects of the universe. In this I think is what Kafka's final words (in The Trial at least). The universe's un-knowablity is, maybe, a source or possibly even potential wellspring of...something...for humanity. What that something is, I haven't a clue, and Kafka doesn't either. But the unknowable is there. And with it a deeper hell, a better world, or something entirely different. ...more

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May 04, 2016 Janet rated it it was ok

I'm glad that I read it, even happier that I am finished. ...more

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Jul 03, 2012 GONZA rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Non era il caso di leggere Kafka quando uno, causa trasloco, si trova in una situazione kafkiana a sua volta. Resta la sensazione di una profondissima angoscia, di una vergogna non ben giustificata e la paranoia impera. Non credo di essere riuscita ad apprezzare la scrittura di Kafka come ne "La metamorfosi" ma sicuramente il sentimento che l'autore voleva convogliare é arrivato tutto e tutto assieme. Le due stelle sono soprattutto perché sono arrabbiata con lui. ...more

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