Such is life that some people are convicted of nonexistent crimes while others are elevated to brilliant careers despite evident character deficiencies. Who but Kafka can show the absurdity of "justice" in a world where power trumps reason, and political strength trumps fairness?Is it only me turning paranoid, or does Kafka become more and more "realistic", as our world turns more and more "kafkaesque"?Maybe the Non-Nobel Prize in Literature this year could go posthumously to all those dystopia...

Somebody must have made a false accusation against me, for I was accused of not having read The Trial without having even raised the topic. I fixed up a brew, poked in a madeleine, and summoned up the liars of recall. I recalled my sixteen-year-old self, in his bedroom in his backwater home town, feasting on Vonnegut, Poe, and Kafka one miserable summer . . . then the liars spoke to me: “Are you merely inserting Kafka’s The Trial as a book you ought to have read during that summer of pain, when

Kafka is tough. Kafka doesn’t play and he doesn’t take prisoners. His "in your grill" message of the cruel, incomprehensibility of life and the powerlessness of the individual is unequivocal, harsh and applied with the callous dispassion of a sadist. Life sucks and then you die, alone, confused and without ever having the slightest conception of the great big WHY. Fun huh?Finishing The Trial I was left bewildered and emotionally distant, like my feelings were stuck looking out into the middle di...

Has this ever happened to you? You're chugging your way through a book at a decent pace, it's down to the last legs, you've decided on the good ol' four star rating, it's true that it had some really good parts but ultimately you can't say that it was particularly amazing. And all of the sudden the last part slams into your face, you're knocked sprawling on your ass by the weight of the words spiraling around your head in a merry go round of pure literary power, and you swear the book is whisper...

Guilt and innocence: Who can be considered innocent and who can be considered guilty?After all, K. lived in a state governed by law, there was universal peace, all statutes were in force; who dared assault him in his own lodgings?The state is an ogre… The citizen is a pygmy… And an ogre can do with a pygmy whatever it wishes… But ogres prefer to eat pygmies and for appearance’s sake they use law… And to apply law there are courts and bureaucracy.The gradations and ranks of the court are infinite...

This book haunts me. I can’t stop thinking about it because I have questions, questions and more questions; I have so many unanswered questions that I will never know the answer to, and it’s slowly killing me!What is the trial? Is K actually guilty or is he innocent? Is this novel a nightmare sequence or a paranormal encountering? Why are so many characters never heard from again? And who is that mysterious figure at the end of the novel that witnesses K's fate? There are just so many questions,...

Isn’t our Whole Life a Trial, in an existential sense?If, like me, you walk a plain and decent path, the world is probably none too friendly toward you. That’s understandable. And I think you should also know that should you plainly persist in it, you’ll probably be Put on Trial. Figuratively speaking.Welcome to the Absurd.But there’s also an UP side to that. I think that anyone who has lived a highly idiosyncratic life, like Franz Kafka and my own totally colossally unsuperstar self, has in tim...

It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessaryNothing speaks a more profound truth than a pristine metaphor…Funny, us, worming through the world ascribing meaning, logic and order to the dumb, blind forces of void. It’s all one can do to maintain sanity in the absurd reality of existence, but what is it worth? Are we trees in gale force winds fighting back with fists we do not possess? Is life the love of a cold, cruel former lover bating us on while only

(Book 701 from 1001 Books) - Der Prozess = The Trial, Franz KafkaThe Trial is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of 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 Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoyevsky a blood rela...

WHAT IS THIS SHIT.I have read many reviews and saw that I belong to the minority who just didn’t like or get this book.Like the author, I am going to leave The Trial unfinished and surrender to the fact that, unfortunately, Franz Kafka’s writing is way too bizarre, inane and unrealistic for my tastes.The protagonist, a pretentious banker named Josef K. woke up one morning to find two strangers in his room who told him he was under arrest. The reason for his conviction is never revealed and even

It's important, in this life, to have goals.Sure, they are often a lesson in the enduring power of futility, our lack of free will as demonstrated by the ever-present arm of bureaucracy. If your goal, for example, is à la our protagonist's, you will spend several years or 341 pages or the rest of your life or a wasted afternoon attempting to extricate yourself from mysterious charges from an absurd institution, progressing not at all in the achievement of this objective but at least proving both...

"A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it isn’t open." —Franz KafkaSomeone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.This famous opening line becomes yet more intriguing as it pitches us directly into a scene whereby the first two protagonists are granted a degree of anonymity by the author, as he seeks to lure us into his philosophical daydream.K is clearly under house arrest, but his perplexing captors aren’t at

The tortured bureaucratic world described in The Trial always strikes me as startlingly modern. I wonderedHow The Trial might have started if Kafka had been an academic writing in 2010K's latest conference paper had been rejected, and now he sat in front of his laptop and read through the referees' comments. One of them, evidently not a native speaker of English, had sent a page of well-meaning advice, though K was unsure whether he understood his recommendations. The second referee had only wri...

A Crazy Train All Aboard! No novel comes close to this one in the intensely nightmarish portrayal of the type of dark "justice" of dictatorial governments, particularly those that came to power after its 1925 publication. THE TRIAL, also like no other, gives the reader a special, and by all means necessary, appreciation for the criminal justice system and the fundamental rights of life and liberty that we take for granted in a democracy. Imagine: you are charged with a crime, but no one will

Josef K. (just his initial is revealed), a banker in the beautiful city of Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic, during the last days of the crumbling Austro- Hungarian Empire, before World War 1, such a man at the young age of thirty, to be in charge of a large bank's finances, yet he lives in a boarding house of Frau Grabach, why a successful person does, is a mystery. Maybe he likes the attractive women there, especially Fraulein Burstner, Josef is a bit of a wolf, then out of the sk...

I vividly remember asking my mother at quite earlier in my years, from where do we get babies, did you buy me from god? The corners of her eyes crinkled, she was reddened deep in effort to try not to burst in her husky laughter, I remember her asking me back with her flushed face, and what do you be doing with answer? I said quite prudently and emphatically, I want to have some. I don’t know where the tail of this baby-talk ended, but I didn’t manage to have any, to this date, albeit being conve...

On his thirtieth birthday, bank employee Josef K. is arrested for an unknown crime and prosecuted on certain Sundays by an unknown agency.Yeah, that's a pretty vague teaser but how else do you drag someone into The Trial?On the surface, The Trial is an absurd legal drama that nicely illustrates how inept bureaucracy can be. However, my little gray cells tell me that's just the tip of the iceberg. The Trial seems to be about how incomprehensible and absurd life can be at times. I don't think it's...

Kafka's Trial is one of those books that are always present in cultural sphere and referenced ad nauseum. Despite never having read Kafka before I am quite sure I used the word 'Kafkaesque' on many occasions and maintained a semi-eloquent conversation about 'The Trial'.I could've probably done without ever reading it but recently I resolved to take my literary pursuits seriously and since books seem to be the only thing in this world I truly care for I might as well take it to another level.'The...

First, a quick summary of this horrible, horrible novel. Some jackass gets arrested, he does things you would not do, sees people you would not see and has thoughts you would not have. After that, a priest and a parable then, mercifully, the end.Now my thoughts. K. is a pompous ass with a very important job - to him. The bureaucrats are the best part of the whole story, all job description, no brains (like now!). K's uncle, lawyer and landlady are very forgettable. Fräulein Bürstner is intriguin...

Reading Franz Kafka's The Trial is a frustrating experience, but that's at least partially the point. Our protagonist, Josef K is arrested, but neither he nor the reader know why he's been arrested. The remaining narrative is a sort of judgment on all the decisions he's made. Although he is 'free' for most of the novel, K's trial consumes all his time, and he is locked in a course of events over which he has little or no control. How are we to judge K's trial? Indeed, K's entire ordeal is imposs...