The Trial by Franz Kafka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
What an interesting journey inside Kafka's absurd reverie; the existential tale that is, like great books, highly controversial and can be interpreted on many levels. The Kafkaesque surrealism and absurdity were quite gripping to say the least with their uncommon characters inside a bureaucratic totalitarian state in the modern industrial age. The novel is about the bleak tale of the protagonist, Josef K., who is caught in a labyrinth of incomprehensible circumstances after being prosecuted with a charge that he knows nothing about in a bureaucratic legal system that virtually no one knows for sure how it works. The story follows his futile efforts to prove his innocence and meanwhile we encounter the other secondary characters with their peculiar behaviour and surreal conversations. There are quite numerous interpretations for this nightmarish story; political, economical, and even religious explanations, for example, the trial might represent life itself, where we are under-arrest trying all the time to understand its meaning and escape our verdicts, the lawyer who claims to know the inner-workings of the court might represent religion in this sense and so on. The story also depicts the desperate life of the common people, and their fear, weakness, and inability which are by-products of the modern industrial age where fear of losing jobs controls peoples' lives.
Despite reading a lot about Kafka style's and for other writers who imitate this style and create similar worlds, this was my first encounter with any of his works and it surely won't be the last. Since I finished it days ago, I couldn't help spending hours and hours with the critical writings about this novel and the kafkian world in general.
I find it worth mentioning that the edition I read was Max Brod's one (Kafka's close friend who first published this incomplete novel after his death in contrary to what was stipulated in his will- to burn all his unpublished works), it came to my knowledge later that subsequent publications included six more chapters that Max Brod considered incomplete. In fact, arguably all the chapters in a sense are incomplete as they weren't revised by Kafka himself. There is also much dispute about the proper chapter sequence between scholars who studied in depth the character development, and some critics believe that it can’t be even described as a novel but should be rather treated as distinct unconnected chapters whose sequence can be left to the reader.
For me, the fact that the novel is incomplete, the different translations (as that of the final sentence), and the controversy about the proper sequence and the incomplete chapters, which brings to mind the controversy about old scriptures, played a part in my affection and fascination with the whole thing. I have a feeling that it will open the door to further and deeper readings of Kafka's legacy.
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