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102 of 110 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the great literary nightmares of the past century, March 3, 2004
Franz Kafka was obsessed with dreams, and THE CASTLE is his attempt to depict the modern world of corporate and governmental bureaucracy as a crazed nightmare. The novel possesses the logic of dreams, and there is a dreamlike quality to everything that happens in the book. As in a dream, people and situations transform effortlessly into something entirely different, as when one of the young, silly assistants of the protagonist K. suddenly appears to be a much older, decrepit man. Though his transformation is absurd, it is part and parcel of the logic of the village dominated by The Castle. I first read this novel years ago when the only option in translation was the Muir translation. This new complete translation, which includes a large section that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod decided to excise, transforms the novel into an entirely different book. For one thing, the section that Brod left out indicates even more vividly the degree to which the novel is concerned with depicting the more horrific aspects of modern bureaucratic life. For another, the manner in which the text simply breaks off in mid-sentence reinforces the nightmarish quality of the book, for just as we wake up from a dream, never able to complete the tale, so we break away from the narrative, never knowing what K.'s fate is. The novel contains more a situation than a plot. K., a surveyor, arrives in a village having been hired by the local Castle, presumably to survey. Instead, K. quickly learns that he may not have been hired at all, and manages to break rapidly a number of laws of which he was utterly unaware and whose logic is far from obvious. In this way we see Kafka exploring one of the great themes of his literature: that all individuals are guilty until proven innocent, and that we have no idea what it means to be innocent. K.'s plight becomes more and more absurd and confused all the way until the point at which Kafka ceased working on the novel. That Kafka gave up working on the novel isn't completely surprising. His method of writing was to growth the text like one would a plant, not necessarily knowing where the story was going, but instead allowing it to develop as it wished. Unlike virtually every other great writer of the past two hundred years, Kafka was almost completely unconcerned with either character development or with plot. It wasn't that he was bad at character: it simply didn't concern him. He was far more interested in pure situations, as if they were thought experiments. For instance, what would happen if a man awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into a giant beetle? Or, what would happen if someone were accused of a crime, but knew neither accuser, the crime of which he is being accused, or where his trial was to be held? Or, what would happen if a man showed up in a village to work as a surveyor, but discovered that he had neither a position nor means to contact those who had hired him? One reading this novel should keep in mind that Kafka spent his entire professional life working as a risk manager in an insurance company. He was acutely aware of the nature of corporate bureaucracy, and the myriad of silly rules and the amount of red tape inundating modern corporate and political life. Some tend towards a metaphysical reading of the novel, and while the book is not immune to such a reading, I think it can be better read on a more concrete social level. Kafka worked in an office his entire adult life, until his tuberculosis forced him to retire on what today would be workers' disability. He knew first hand the degrading, callous, and inhuman nature of the bureaucratic culture that was threatening to engulf modern urban living. Unfortunately, he did not, like K. in the novel, know how to escape the nightmare himself, or give us advice on how we could escape it ourselves.
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Getting by in a dream world..., May 27, 2001
Those like myself who seldom read fiction but enjoy looking at the world through different lenses may find the reading of this work rewarding. K's travails evoked memories of my time in the military (in Southeast Asia): nothing is as it appears, days of boredom are interrupted by moments of bewildering activity, people have whole menus of hidden agendae, one struggles to attain goals that later prove empty of significance, chance meetings turn out to have been pivotal, and apparently chance meetings turn out to have been carefully staged for one's benefit (or detriment!). K lives in a world very much like ours... where the puppetmasters are unknown strangers, and our companions turn out to be very unlike what they appear. If this novel has any practical value (heresy!) it is as a manual on techniques of 'how to navigate in the dark.' For those who doubt it, one can navigate in the dark, but one must use one's ears (distant sounds of crashing waves, the echoes of thunder, the direction of the seabreezes). The biggest obstacle to finding one's way is a full moon -- one can see the sea, but the stars (far more important!) disappear from view. ... All in all, I liked Kafka's book. As each of the characters around him reveal the reasons behind their bizarre behaviors, they become 'normal' humans, disappointing but less weird. K is in some ways a lightning rod, provoking his very upset neighbors into revealing the reasons for their anger and frustration with him. After awhile one doesn't even care any more about The Castle and its occupants; the village is more real and surviving in it is a lot more important than escaping from it.
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Account of Alienation and Absurdity, February 29, 2008
Review of "The Castle" by Franz Kafka
This book made me into a Kafka admirer. He brings life to characters in otherwise drab situations and makes them seem very real. The reader feels the frustration, absurdity, the pettiness and the powerlessness in a personal way. You feel the haughtiness and aloofness of the Castle staff as if they were a part of your own community. You feel the pettiness and delusional gossip of the townspeople as if you were seeing it first hand. The story is riveting and the pace seems fast even when there is little action.
The story starts with the protagonist (identified only by his initial, K.) walking to what sounds like a routine surveying job. Soon he is frustrated by a very confusing series of obstacles. As the story develops the obstacles become more chaotic. K.'s original purpose in going to the castle is never fully elaborated and his motives seem lost or stolen. The forces acting upon K. are shrouded. It seems as if some invisible force has plotted to test K. to the limit of human endurance of tolerance of ambiguity.
Kafka combines the themes of:
social class commentary,
alienation from a heartless social system,
absence of any protective power,
salvation,
redemption,
fear of strangers,
fear of change,
search for the meaning of life,
inscrutability of authorities,
indifference of forces ruling human fate,
persistence in the face lost purpose,
abuse of power
and
acceptance of pointlessness goals.
As the plot progresses it takes on a surreal nightmare quality. Is the protagonist having a nightmare, going insane or confronting the reality of his situation?
There is no end to the frustration. We are never told if K. is having a nightmare or going insane. We never discover why K. is so determined to enter the castle that he would tolerate and even join in to the absurdity. His original purpose of doing a surveying job could never justify his struggle to gain admittance. We are left seeing K. as a perpetual outsider. Perhaps Kafka is telling us that there is no end or limit to frustration, alienation and absurdity. Those seeking an answer to the ageless enigma of existence will never find a simple resolution.
This is a disturbing work that challenges conventional notions of plot and character development while testing the readers conception of his/her purpose in life. The Castle will confront the reader in unexpected ways and raise emotional personal issues that would otherwise be repressed.
See:
The Metamorphosis
The Trial
Amerika
Collections:
The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Classics Series)
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)
The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka
Blue Octavo Notebooks
Kafka's Selected Stories (Norton Critical Edition)
Give It Up: And Other Short Stories
Great German Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)
I highly recommend this book.
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