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Summary: Kafka must be read (or heard)
Review: I recently completed the audio book of The Trial. Other reviewers have spoken at length about the dream-like nature of Kafka's prose and the incredibly way by which he captures the absurdity of daily decisions. The Trial offers us much food for thought, seeming to foreshadow the rise of totalitarian governments, yet remaining maddeningly unclear about K's agency in his own life.I'd like to offer a plug for listening to this book on tape. The audio version offers excellent narration by Geoffrey Howard. Howard's range of voices is excellent, and he truly does justice to Kafka's long Germanic sentences. Listening to the book was a pleasure - and made me look forward to my commute (always the sign of a good audio book). My one quibble with the audio version is that some of the fragments, played at the end, could have been interwoven with the text, which itself is unfinished.
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Summary: a true masterpiece
Review: Joseph K. is a clerk who works in a bank.One morning he is told that he is guilty.The novel is a masterpiece in the very intricate psychological details that Kafka reveals in K's absurd behavior and attitude towrds his case.K. never knows why he is guilty, and througout the novel there is a striking contrast between his rational and resolute intention to defend himself (but the problem is that there is no one to appeal to!) and his obscure and rashfull behaviour which tends to be very spontaneous and very original but which only gets him closer to his dreadful fate.One is reminded of Camus "the stranger" in the sense that K. is morally detached from his socity but who also knows how to play the social game very skillfully to maitain his total detachment from all social conventions and formalities.In a sense, he also reminds me of Bazarov in Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" as a "man of his own made" using Turgenev words.K. is a very lucid and highly-minded character who just wants to be left alone.In fact, one can argue that the only guilt of K. is precisely the state of detachment from his society which he cultivated very carefully throughout his life.In K., Kafka succeeds in creating a character who defies the ethics of society and who truly represents the confusion and absurdity brought about by the 20th century.Kafka, like Camus and Doestoyovsky in his "letters from the underground" reveals the most naked pages in literature of a character who refuses to be a screwdriver in a big machine called society .I highly recommend the novel to all lovers of literature and to anybody interested.Moreover, the novel is a testimony to the sense of detachment, absurdity and anguish that any serious human being who is truthful to the ideas and ideals brought about by this century is bound to confront and to live with.It is a true masterpiece of human absurdity and a celebration of Kafka's literary talent.
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Summary: The Trial is no error
Review: Life itself is a "prozess" or trial, during which we live under a death sentence for which we can discover no reason. This is the deeper meaning of The Trial. Interpretations which focus on the political meaning are not wrong, but thet are too shallow. The cruelty and the bizarre nature of politics derive from the perplexities of life itself. Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis has nothing to do with public life, but it has almost the same message. Readers are more likely to appreciate Kafka if they know what he is talking about. Make the effort, he's one of the great writers of the 20th century.
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Summary: the death of transcendence and hope
Review: "the trial" is my favorite work of fiction by kafka, and i think this is a perfect introduction to his work for readers who are new to him. joseph k is charged with a crime about which he can learn nothing, interrogated by police without finding out anything, and is ultimately executed "like a dog". all of kafka's work is extremely allegorical, and it seems to me that this work is his veiled and somewhat morbid way of expressing the obvious truth that the fundamental questions of man's existence are not only completely unanswerable but themselves beyond his comprehension. k looks frantically for some reason or sense to the unjust persecution that he is suffering, but is as empty handed at the end of his quest as he is at it's beginning. the frantic search for meaning lived by the artist and thinker is utterly useless and doomed from the outset. we are condemned to die no matter how heroically and tenaciously we search for some purpose behind our search, and this is a permanent and quite unalterable state of affairs. kafka's work is a must for the seeker of truth, and although he does not offer a shred of hope, if nothing else he helps us to relax and be easier on ourselves by revealing the ugly fact that our painful and useless search for purpose is utterly futile and unnecessary.
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Summary: The many levels of Kafka
Review: "The Trial" is one of the most extraordinary works of literature in the 20th century. The states of consciousness invoked by Kafka mirror the intellectual milieu of the period. There is a strong dreamlike quality to the text, undoubtedly influenced by Freud. Of course, there is also the existential dilemma at work: fate and chance squaring off. In addition, Kafka's representation of the legal system and the role of the "average" citizen is eerily similar to how many Americans would describe their impressions of and experiences with the legal system in the United States. More levels and sublevels could be explored, but these three suffice in order to frame the main question of the novel. For me, the main question of "The Trial" is: To whom are we responsible for our lives? Let's think about this. Why does K. spend so much time and effort trying to prove his innocence? Why does this kangaroo court have authority over his life? This is where the theater of the absurd surfaces. Only someone with a partial identity, such as K. (without a full name, you are not a full person), could be caught in this absurd world. As readers, we know there are alternatives to the course followed by K. Yet, we can empathize with K. because we too have found ourselves in situations that seem out of our control. Kafka captures this state of affairs brilliantly. Ironically, Kafka's writing is his way of gaining control over the absurdity of life, even when he is representing that very absurdity. On the other hand, K. is unable to imagine any other possibility besides the path he treads. In the end, his death is not murder, it's suicide. Those who lack imagination welcome death.
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Summary: The Trial: Dream Sequence and Self-Control
Review: The Trial is NOT a terrifying novel of powerlessness. The emotional detachment of K., who is not terrified, should illustrate this for us. The impossible, occasionally horrifying imagery in the story is so clearly surreal that it does not provoke a real response. I interpret the action as occurring in a dream: specifically, Josef K.'s dream. K. is the center of the action; the trial is his trial; everyone wants to "get" him. He is the only real motivating force in the story. While this fact illustrates his importance, what gives him power is his logical and insistent defense of himself. He never considers himself anything but innocent; even the end of the story only shows his refusal to succumb to the court's will. This independence keeps K. in a position of self-actualized control. Now why does everyone read the book as terrifying? Maybe if one neglected to look at the review on the back cover before perusal of the book, one would have a different view.
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Summary: Excellent
Review: Franz Kafka's "The Trial" is the short story of a man "arrested" for a crime he has no knowledge of which leads to a "trial" in which the authorities give him no elucidation as to what his crime actually is. Josef K., the accused, battles throughout the book to gain insight into his immensely frustrating and confusing situation, but every bit of new information leads to closed doors and more confusion. "The Trial" is the personification of Kafka's bleak view of life and the human situation. Read this book, if only for the priest's tale at the novel's close of the man who seeks admittance into the Law. It is a story within a story, the profoundness of which rivals Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" from "The Brothers Karamazov." This is a great book that the average reader will consume in a couple nights.
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Summary: One Of The Best, and Unique Books I Have Ever Read!
Review: I just finished reading this novel a day ago, it was the first novel by Franz Kafka that I have ever read. I've never read any other book quite like this one! Kafka has one of the best methods of getting his messege through than any other author. Its not what you would expect from the summary though. I expected to read a non-stop action story about a man who is innocent, but is accused of a crime, and is forced to go on trial. Well that was what the story was about, but the book was much more complex, to me, the trial way just a way for Kafka to let out all of his helpless feelings.
You end up feeling sorry for the author, because there is no way that anyone could write something of so much sorrow, without expieriencing it themselves, and if you have gone through a lot of sorrow, then you will be able to relate to this novel a lot!
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Summary: A case of misunderstanding
Review: After reading some of the other reviews, I realize that people have misunderstood Kafka's book almost entirely. No one should be discouraged from reading this book just because one never finds out what Josef K. "did" or what crime he committed (in fact, the other reviewers should not even have GIVEN that AWAY in their reviews!). Since the cat has been let out of the bag, I will comment. The point is that it does NOT matter what Josef K. did (ready?)......because he DIDN'T do anything. Kafka foresaw modern bureaucracy and totaletarian government; he had the insight to see what the future held, and expressed it in this symbolic novel. To call the book frustrating is akin to calling sugar sweet. Ask someone who lived in Vienna Germany or Russia in the 1930s (or all of Eastern Europe since and before WWII, for that matter) , if the book really has so little to do with the real world. Also, take a look at Arthur Koestler's classic "Darkness at Noon"--a not unsimilar novel about a Russian revolutionary who is captured and accused of crimes by the government he once served. Take a close look at Koestler's introduction to the book, where he states that the novel has its basis in ACTUAL EVENTS. Then, maybe certain reviewers will know how to approach Kafka's worldview and body of work.
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Summary: Lasting literature from an introverted man
Review: It shows on every page of this book that Kafka was an introverted, obsessive man struggling to come to terms with a world in which he always felt out of place. One should perhaps judge the art without reference to the artist's life, but this novel MAKES the reader ask the question: "who could write this?", or even - in the most frustrating passages - "Kafka, you should've got out more!" This novel is more like a long short story than a novel. The situations in which Joseph K finds himself seem unreal fantasies of a man who was too preoccupied with himself to embrace the richness of the real world. The real world does not exist in this story, other than by accident when we think about the man who wrote it - and that is where the longevity of his vision comes from. In other words this is not a great novel - it has no life about it, and it is tedious - but one never forgets the stories of Kafka because they reflect the worries of all ordinary thinking people in the modern age. Nobody in literature has elucidated feelings of alienation like Kafka, and that is why he will always have readers. His work is haunting, lasting, but not always enjoyable. To best see the greatness (however accidental it was) of his writing, with elaborate and horrifying visions rendered somehow mundane, one should read his short stories, such as 'Metamorphosis' and 'In the Penal Colony', which are fascinating and irresistable. But this novel will not be enjoyed by many, for one expects more dimensions from the format, and Kafka had only one crude and frightening dimension to his writing: the horror of alienation.
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