The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library) Kindle Edition

Be forewarned when you crack open this book. The mind must be prepared and focused, with no expectations of stability or calmness. And remember that anger management is to be dispensed with when encountering the townspeople of this novel, whose speech is never friendly, and whose intellectual capacities are almost completely atrophied. One could view them as a prank, as a dark joke perhaps from one or many of the Greek fates that influenced K into entering this miserable town, where it is clear that what he encountered has no value to him or anyone else.

Atypical or not, whether they form a statistical outlier or not, there is not one character in the town that has any redeeming virtue, except for maybe as a warning, as an example of what to caution yourself against becoming. For your intellect and attitude to have any intersection with these people is to follow the path of intellectual and personal decay, a path that will be characterized and determined by cynicism, apathy, and xenophobia.

Even if it is a structure of bricks and mortar, Castle Mount is a fiction, a place whose surreal inhabitants hold the populace in permanent intellectual bondage, with their minds polluted by an excess of veneration for authority, whether real or imagined. The populace, who are allergic to hospitality, where courtesy is never a part of communication, and who have no respect for themselves or their own potential, demand respect for Count Westwest, with the hair on their pathetic necks standing up straight when being confronted with anyone who does not show this unjustified and cognitively vacuous reverence.

K prefers to be a free agent, and therefore residing in The Castle would (rightfully) compromise this freedom and its corollary of intellectual independence. Embedding yourself in organized bureaucracy with its simulacra and exaggerated and ephemeral displays of power and you morph into the organization, with your opinions not your own but rather belong to a collection of entities and social structures that have no legitimate function. But K does not have an impulse to prejudge things, choosing instead to demand evidence for assertions about livability and suitability. His mind is intact upon arriving. The townspeople have it as their goal to remove it as quickly as possible.

Rather than a flock of crows circling around The Castle, it is more fitting to have a flock of vultures, who are ready to indulge themselves in its fallen citizens-those who have died a personal and cognitive death. It might be slim pickings for these birds though, as the skulls of the Castle dwellers will be near to empty, reflecting the lack of use of the neuronal apparatus, this being surrendered to the echelons of imagined power structures with their elitist and haughty view of common laborers who are undeserving of respect, who are invisible and indiscernible, like the F.F. Coppola maid of Mr. Waltz standing in his presence of the sitting consigliere Mr. Hayden, whose presence and humanity is never to be acknowledged.

There are many lessons to take away from this book, the most important being to always be aware of the impact of discouraging surroundings, and don’t get used to disappointments, lest one conclude that existence is naturally a dark and hostile soup, the latter of which if not watched on the stove of personality will boil over and ruin one’s emotional and conceptual apparatus, and fill it with cynicism and despair.

I am one who resonates deeply with the kind of themes that Kafka treats in his works: bureaucracy, meaning, connection, relationships, and how hierarchy impacts the way we experience and sit in the world. This is an unfinished novel--this is true. But if you have read any Kafka, I you probably understand that this plain simple truth should not deter a venture into the text. In fact, the mid-sentence ends in just the right spot--it leaves the reader with the resounding feeling that in fact the feeling you've been having the entire book--namely that K, the main character, is forever stuck in a maze of absurd bureaucratic run-arounds--is how life for K will be for the indefinite future. There is no major epiphany. No breakthrough that makes the previous 270 pages feel as if they were actually building to some transcendent moment. I gravitate toward texts that attempt to show--and not just tell--about this feature of our existence. The reality, I believe, Kafka is proposing is that we aren't necessarily building to any logical apex of life or existence. We spin our wheels and then once we kick the bucket, the rest of us go on spinning, churning, grasping for some shred of meaning. Kafka had this all figured out. Amen.

I'm not especially interested in guesswork at what the castle represents. Instead, it is the dreamy, endless, circular prose that captivated my imagination from the first few paragraphs. One has the sense of K. being trapped in purgatory as he attempts again and again to reach the castle or at least make sense of the confounding village and navigate its bureaucracies. Bureaucracy, incidentally, is far too easy and uninteresting an answer for what this tale illustrates.

I encountered Kafka via Murakami, and it is especially the brain-bound city/afterlife in "Hardboiled Wonderland..." that points to Kafka's surreal prose and the sense of separation and distraction throughout. In a way, "The Castle" reminds me of trying to focus on reading text in an actual dream: the harder your sleeping self focuses, the more senseless and abstract the words become.

As provocative as reading Kafka is, I like listening to the unparalleled cadence of his prose. As Walter Benjamin indicates, Kafka's ouvre is the testament of our time. What we really needed was an attorney to litigate the absurd madness the direction of our civilization has taken. Kafka gave us that.
Now, let's set the record straight. There are a number of reviews here that partake in this madness. The Castle is a masterpeice, perhaps even greater than The Trial, and one of the magisterial achievements in prose fiction. The unfinished conversation, breaking off mid-sentence is ... perfection. The seal of the unanimous approval of desitiny. What more needed to be said? The endless rondo of futility must continue unto death. What more appropriate condemnation?
Further, Harmon's translation is vastly superior to that of the Muirs. Be aware of this fact. In time, I doubt whether the Muir translations will be read by any but scholars and the unfortunate. George Guidall is also a magnificent actor with such measured inflections of voice in this flawless narration, the performance can only be rated as virtuoso.

This is probably the stupidest book I've ever read. Worse, there is no ending. It cuts off mid-sentence. Now I understand what Kafkaesque really means: a crazy mess that makes little sense and feels like a bad dream. Imo, the person who found the manuscript should have honored the author's dying wish and burned it.