UK Amazon Kindle Forum discussion
General Chat - anything Goes
>
Kafka - The Trial
date
newest »
newest »
heresy!If the chapters are incomplete it's because Kafka ordered his executors to burn all his works on his death. His book "The Castle" I believe is superior to "The Trial" but that is even more incomplete because of the flames.
Why is he a significant writer? because he encapsulated imminent modernity better than any of his contemporaries, the confusion and alienation caused by bureaucracies gone mad. His books have a push-me, pull-you drive as the central characters veer between hope and utter despair as they try and navigate themselves through the nightmare of their world. Tiny little victories seem to offer a scintilla of hope, before the jackboot of authority comes crashing down to pound it into the dirt. Kafka plays with your emotions like this as a virtuoso twiddles his Stradivarius. You may not be being helped by a duff further proof then just read his short story "The Metamorphosis". IMhO the greatest short story ever written.
Hmm. Metamorphosis. I may have read that. It obviously didn't make much impression :) Let me dig it out
Read it a long time ago. Loved it to bits, although it is disconcerting and gloomy. Mind you, the edition you linked to looks like it might not have been typeset very well. The text seems very dense and hard to read.
Oh, Kafka is one of the greats.The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis and all the short stories are well worth a go, despite modern bureaucracy, officialdom and governments seemingly using them as instruction manuals.
It also worth bearing this in mind:
Kafka's friend, Max Brod, talked of how Kafka found humour in his dark works - especially the chilling "The Trial", which he thought a hoot, laughing so hard while reading the first chapter aloud, that he repeatedly had to stop to collect himself.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/book...
I love Kafka. The film of The Trial, starring Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles and Jeanne Moreau, is hypnotic.I've yoinked the book at 39p though, that's too good to miss!
Steven Berkoff did an extraordinary stage production of "The Trial".he also did "Metamorphosis" but I can't remember a lot about that, since I don't think you can improve on the book.
I loved his books tho did read them in German - a long time ago.
If you are interested Melvyn Bragg did an In Our Time about The Trial not long ago:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04pv8j1
Of course it all depends on whether you think the academic study of literature has much in common with reading books, which so often doesn't seem to be the case.
I read The Trial some years ago. It was aptly named in my opinion.
Loved The Trial, found it haunting and sinister.Metamorphosis, likewise.
99 per cent of the time, I can't read a book if I've seen a film of it first - but with Metamorphosis and The Trial, I'd seen films first as a teenager, and they'd whetted my appetite just perfectly for when I came to the books later.
The Orson Welles/Anthony Perkins black and white film of The Trial seemed to capture the Bureaucratic State atmosphere perfectly - (maybe setting up things for Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil later on...)
Kafka's other novel, The Castle, threw me off somehow, I only read half-way...maybe it wasn't my thing, or, maybe it was not such a developed draft as The Trial, maybe Kafka hadn't finished it, or come so close to finishing before he died at 40...I don't know.
Or maybe I just wasn't ready for that one yet...must be 20 years now since I read Kafka, could have another go some time.
His short stories were interesting, many of them only a paragraph long, always wondered if that influenced James Kelman's paragraph-long short stories he'd put in long collections.
Later on, I'd see East European poems that were also like paragraphs, so things seemed to have come full circle - paragraph-long stories, paragraph-long poems, until I wasn't sure which was which any more!
Maybe we'll enter the era of the audacious paragraph-long novel soon...
I just listened to Melvin Bragg - In our Time. It was about Kafka - The trial.
Has anyone read it? The speakers seemed passionate about it but frankly they confirmed my opinion that Kafka was a bit of a fraud.
The experts made a virtue of the characters being underdeveloped and several chapters not being complete.
Well, for 39p I might give it a try but I'm not convinced....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trial-Dover-T...