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Summary: franz k at his best
Review: Kafka's allegory comes a full circle in this story of unusual twist of circumstances. Joseph k get's arrested one fine morning for an unknown & unrevealed crime and is forced to encounter some unusual circumstances thereafter. From the nature of his crime to the judicial authorities, it is an elusive world that surrounds joseph k. His relationship with his landlady, his interaction with his lawyer, his lady love are all witnesses to his downward spiral as k. struggles to make some meaning of his life. He only get's entangled between his self-esteem, his values & the realities he is forced to face. A lost & defeated k. gives in to circumstances at the end. Trial is perhaps the most forceful work of kafka with his allegory being extremely apt in expressing some very profound dilemmas of human existence. Joseph k's character is a symbol of an entire mankind struggling to intrepret and manipulate the bewildering circumstances victimising it.
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Summary: K. puts himself on TRIAL
Review: I have done a lot of research on Kafka and think can offer someinsight into THE TRIAL which I found to be a brilliant book. The trialthat K. finds himself in is actually taking place in his own mind. Itis his moral consciousness, so long dormant, rising up and judging hislife, his nature, his excess. ...This is not my idea but one that I readabout half way through the novel. The other thing that is so marvelousabout the story is that it lends itself to so many meanings andinterpretations. But take a look at it from this perspective and seeif it opens the tale up for you. I highly recommend Breon Mitchell'snew translation. And for anyone interested in a beautiful biography ofKafka, check out NIGHTMARE OF REASON by Ernst Pawl. It's an incrediblyenlightening journey into the life of this enigmatic genius.
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Summary: Absurd and Kafkaesque
Review: Franz Kafka's "The Trial" is a novel about how the machinery of bureaucracy marches on in perpetuity without regard for the reasons why. In the novel the character "K." is arrested for a crime the nature of which is never explained to him. K. must live each day with the burden of his supposed guilt. Day after day he is hounded by the courts in a process that rolls on with no apparent logic carrying it along. The burden of this wears the character down until it becomes almost unbearable... My favorite scene in the novel is where K. goes to the court to seek the ear of the magistrate. Hours go by as the court ever so slowly deals with case after case. K.'s case seems lost in the docket and we despair with him. "The Trial" is just like another Kafka's novel "The Castle". There a character, also named K., tries without success to see a city leader with whom he has a supposed contract to do some work. The reader and the character anguish at the mindless nature of the obstacles put up in his path. K. never gets to see the city official and Kafka seems to give up in despair too when he leaves the novel unfinished. In "The Trial" we try to cast off the mindless bureaucracy. In "The Castle" we try to navigate it. The situation in both novels is absurd. The keyword here is "absurb" and has been latched onto by Kafka devotées. In Praque there is a theater called "Theater of the Absurd" where I saw two of Vaclav Havel's plays. No doubt this name is homage to Franz Kafka and his work. I am sure that Kafka influenced Havel. The word "Kafkaesque" has also been added to the language courtesy of Kafka. It has come to symbolize any extremely mindless matter or ludicrous situation. The whole of Chech culture under communism was an absurdity that was cleverly forecast by Franz Kafka himself. This was what Vaclav Havel wrote about in his plays and essays. Some people might find "The Trial" a little difficult to read. Paragraphs consume whole pages. There is very little dialogue which, in my mind, makes it easier to follow. Still I read it twice-not to understand it better but to enjoy it once again. Kafka wrote his novel in German. This is somewhat remarkable because he was a Jew living in Chechoslovakia. You would think that he would have written in Yiddish or Chech. That his novel was written in German maybe helped him gain a wider audience in the West. His book did not achieve wide acclaim until it as promoted by a friend after Kafka's death.
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Summary: Up the Ladder of Death...
Review: Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers. This new edition is based upon the work of an international team of experts who have restored the text, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create a version that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.
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Summary: A nightmarish, emaciated vision of modern society
Review: This is unquestionably a powerful, enigmatical modern, and even postmodern text, with its sordid portrayal of an urbanized universe. It is also a classic essay on the folly of existence. - "Like a dog!" - For what crime is K. on trial? How can he redeem himself? And who is the face at the window, glimpsed towards the end...? - There are no facts, no causes, no continuity; life is a glaring, unfathomable absurdity. All are constrained by the necessity of obeying the inscrutable "law" that controls all and has everything in its thrall. Kafka's writing is superb, with acute powers of suggestion. His preoccupations are with the law, guilt, redemption and the absolute. His work, which has been very much overrated, in my view, is a brilliant but unpardonably clever description of the pressures and anxieties of modern industrial life.
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Summary: Boring Book
Review: this book is boring and doesn't make any sense, i wonldn read it again
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Summary: Thank you, Max Brod.
Review: Upon Kafka's rather premature death, his good friend Max Brod went to work riffling through the paperwork he had left behind. Amongst the many bits and pieces of his work (many was only bits and pieces- Kafka never thought his novels to be entirely complete), there was a letter written to Brod, instructing him to burn all of his work. In closer examination, Brod found an earlier draft of the letter, which instructed him to keep certain pieces, The Trial being one of them. Thank you, Mr. Max Brod, for disregarding the first draft of Franz Kafka's letter. The Trial is a profound documentation of a self-made man's descent into madness, brought about by a false accusal of an unknown deed. This descent is explored beautifully. As the book progesses, the events become increasingly nightmarish and surreal. We finish the book unsettled and fatigued, with more questions than answers. The adjective "Kafkaesque" trully has more meaning. The aspect I found most interesting was that K. is never given any defining characteristics- his actions often contradict each other, and many times he acts wholly irrationally. Coupled with the fact that his wrongdoing is never named, the reader automatically identifies with K. Anyone, you, me, your closest friend, could be K. Those who are "newbies" to Kafka: please consider tackling his short stories first- get a taste of Kafka before you devour him whole. Suggested reading would be "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," "The Judgement," or "A Country Doctor." These short stories are quite enjoyable, and will answer the question as to whether you are trully hardy enough to be Kafka material.
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Summary: A quintesential view of the Twentieth Century
Review: "The Trial" ranks with Hana Arendt's study of Fascism as oneof the emblematic texts of the Twentieth Century. Like Arendt, Kafkaprovides us with an illuminating view of the efficient evil ofburaucracy.In the novel, Joseph K is an ordinary and unimportantoffice worker who is arrested and put on trial for a crime that isnever identified. After his arrest, K is released and placed undersurveillance until his trial. As he continuously encounters theaparatus of state, K realizes that his fate and his identity areentirely defined by someone else.... K...wonders if the movements ofa bystander have any meaning at all. Is the person greeting him,expressing alarm at his fate, cheering the process, or doing somethingcompletely unrelated to his murder? Individuals and the legalaparatus in this book are not concerned with justice so much asprocess process. To anyone who finds this story too byzantine andconfusing, just read a few pages of "The Gulag Archipelago"or read the account of a surviving political prisoner of anycountry. In most cases, the arrested person has no idea of his/hercrime and is coersed into accepting a fate that bears no relation tohis/her action. The individual in this case is not a human being butan inanimate unit controlled or disposed of by others.Kafkaexamined the peculiar Twentieth Century phenomenon of depersonalizingand disposing of a human being with no apparent justification. Wheresome writers have chronicled this from a political and historicalperspective, Kafka examined it from a psychological one. He took usinto the thoughts and fears of a prisoner of the state.
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Summary: The best grotesque fable on Earth
Review: The Trial stands alone in its crude scope of the incomprehensible nightmares that lead the path of humanity. That same feeling of inaction and of being submerged in a grotesque labyrinth, so present in his short stories, explodes here with no mercy to its ill-fated protagonist K. Assaulted by the fact of being charged of an inextricable crime, K lives a nightmare of bureaucracy and psychological self mutilation while trying to understand the impossible. However, K himself is in no way different or innocent: he is as human as everyone of us...perhaps this was Kafka's point, advising that it is humanity which is punished by its own complex and intangible self machinery. Seldom has such a sour fable of inevitable downfall been so efficient and accurate. The novel is relatively short, but its content has by now transcended all frontiers due to its actuality; one can relate (with its obvious discrepancies) with the red taped chaos surrounding the characters. K embarks on individual episodes, from everyday office life to visiting the infernal and the vulgar, grotesque demi monde of the legal tribunals. In none of these places he is free of the impregnable burden unknown to all but the 'system'. The novel was never completed and surely Kafka would have enhanced his detail of that terrifying world; however, of what was left we obtained an obliged tale for any reader, and the living testimony that ranks Kafka with Joyce, Proust, Faulkner and Borges as fundamental story tellers of the 20th Century. (Put special emphasis on the chapter when K goes to the church. Here, Kafka develops his parable on justice and its ulterior unreachable nature. This chapter is sure to be one of the most intense prose ever written.)
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Summary: The trial is a master piece!
Review: The trial is more then merely a story about a man named K: the story is about the individual against society at large and how the individual gets crushed by petty beureaucrats,i.e., people whom fear strong individuals and want to make them part of the system.
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