454 pages
French language
Published May 24, 1987
The Trial (German: Der Process, previously Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, …
The Trial (German: Der Process, previously Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.
This novel was a joy to read. This labyrinth of relativising statements which grind down each others content until nothing is actually said is a timeless comment on bureaucracy and capitalist alienation in general.
That was disappointing. Too dense, too random and K is such an annoyingly obnoxious character that, by the second chapter, I was wishing they'd just lock him up and throw away the key.
The story can be read as a warning against the banal bureaucracy ot totalitarianism, but these themes have been much better handled by subsequent writers.
