Franz Kafka The Trial (1914)
I'm sure we all know about this one, it being the book which seems to have given us the term Kafkaesque, describing actions where the mechanism or structure of what occurs is so ludicrously convoluted and confusing as to negate whatever the original point may have been; so here, as you may already know, we have Josef K who faces trial without ever quite discovering what he's supposed to have done. I assumed it would be a courtroom drama, albeit more by way of a written equivalent to expressionist cinema than Perry Mason, but we don't even get that far. Josef is arrested, and there's something approximating a conclusion at the end, but the intermediate chapters mostly comprise impenetrable conversations with his friends, relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues as he prepares himself for whatever may lay ahead, and these chapters are such that it doesn't really seem to matter which order they appear in. I liked Metamorphosis a lot, but Metamorphosis was relatively snappy compared to this which, despite some nicely made observations, never really adds up to anything and is thus something of a slog, possibly because I suspect the whole point was specifically its failure to add up to anything.
The introduction explains how The Trial was one of a number of unpublished works found amongst Kafka's belongings following his death in 1924, and he requested that it should be burned. Obviously it wasn't, and so we have this, a work with which the author himself was presumably unhappy, and I can see why. Without bearing the burden of any specific flaw, The Trial is simply a better idea than it is a novel unless you really, really love the fuck out of Kafka. For my money, it's readable, but then that album which Simon Napier-Bell once patched together out of Marc Bolan outtakes and offcuts is probably listenable by some definition.
I'm sure we all know about this one, it being the book which seems to have given us the term Kafkaesque, describing actions where the mechanism or structure of what occurs is so ludicrously convoluted and confusing as to negate whatever the original point may have been; so here, as you may already know, we have Josef K who faces trial without ever quite discovering what he's supposed to have done. I assumed it would be a courtroom drama, albeit more by way of a written equivalent to expressionist cinema than Perry Mason, but we don't even get that far. Josef is arrested, and there's something approximating a conclusion at the end, but the intermediate chapters mostly comprise impenetrable conversations with his friends, relatives, acquaintances, and colleagues as he prepares himself for whatever may lay ahead, and these chapters are such that it doesn't really seem to matter which order they appear in. I liked Metamorphosis a lot, but Metamorphosis was relatively snappy compared to this which, despite some nicely made observations, never really adds up to anything and is thus something of a slog, possibly because I suspect the whole point was specifically its failure to add up to anything.
The introduction explains how The Trial was one of a number of unpublished works found amongst Kafka's belongings following his death in 1924, and he requested that it should be burned. Obviously it wasn't, and so we have this, a work with which the author himself was presumably unhappy, and I can see why. Without bearing the burden of any specific flaw, The Trial is simply a better idea than it is a novel unless you really, really love the fuck out of Kafka. For my money, it's readable, but then that album which Simon Napier-Bell once patched together out of Marc Bolan outtakes and offcuts is probably listenable by some definition.
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