4.5 stars rounded up" It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay deep in snow. There was nothing to be seen of Castle Mount, for mist and darkness surrounded it, and not the faintest glimmer of light showed where the great castle lay. K. stood on the wooden bridge leading from the road to the village for a long time, looking up at what seemed to be a void ."Such are the opening lines of this novel, where almost nothing is quite as it appears.Kafka wrote to Milena Jesenská as regards

Honestly, I quit.It was too, how do I say it?...Kafkaesque. But am I greater than the writer himself? No. Kafka quit too and just as mid-sentence as I--only later in the text. Evidently, he died of tedium. Thank goodness I stopped before Kafka's work killed me too.I was not enriched by the petty squabbles of German? Czech? villagers and the gyrating evasions of bureaucrats worshiped in detail by said squabbling villagers. I didn't like the protagonist; I couldn't even admire K. for not liking K....

(Book 691 From 1001 Books) - Das Schloss = Das Schloß = The Castle, Franz KafkaThe Castle is a 1926 novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as K. arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle. Kafka died before finishing the work, but suggested it would end with K. dying in the village, the castle notifying him on his death bed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circu...

I'm re-reading The Castle 10 years later with older, more patient eyes and it's proving to be a wonderful time, especially with the new translation."The Eighth Chapter" of The Castle is, perhaps, some of the most beautifully composed writing in all of modern literature. The new translation adds a dreamy, sudden stillness and frightening sense of desolate open space in Kafka's work which is better known for his breathless, claustophobic style of writing and description. This feeling was lost and

Four stars to keep the Kafka cartel from adopting me to their ranks and slapping me with their theses on the role of Klamm as übermensch and Olga as überwench. Franz transfers The Trial to a small village, where K. struggles to receive an appointment at the department for deportment in the castle, and sets about seducing a barmaid on the floor of the bar (no one told me Kafka was so erotic!), and making wrong utterances to every person encountered. The fact this novel breaks off mid-sentence pro...

It was the start of the year when NK. picked up The Castle by Kafka, a book he had tried to read a lot of times but failed in the past; but now he was full of a new resolution that he will finish it this time. He had hardly read a few pages, however, when his wife called him. "We need to withdraw some money from the bank," she said: "There are a lot of bills to be paid, and some of them are long overdue.""Can't we do it online?" NK. grumbled. "No," said his wife. "The grocer and the vegetable pe...

“Now what could have attracted me to this desolate land other than the desire to stay?” In The Castle, Kafka’s protagonist ludicrously struggles to gain entrance to and make sense of the Castle, an entity which is effectively unattainable and incomprehensible.Reading the book felt like coming home one day to discover that all of your belongings have been shifted 5 centimeters to the left, with the exception of one lone, grimy spoon. Nearly everything was askew to some degree. This book was so

I was warned in advance about "The Castle". The warnings turned out to be right. While this being an intriguing story, it's quite difficult to get through. For me, "The Castle" is a good metaphor for the last stage of Kafka's life. While he was struggling with his health (mentally as well as physically), uncertainty about his future and the turbulences in his love life, it put him in a position where he did not know where to go or whom/what to turn to. Just like the protagonist K. As a consequen...

The devil has a library. Alongside Necronomicon and Malleus Maleficarum, you can find a copy of Franz Kafka's The Castle. To read this is to know pain. This book is an ungodly torment. It doesn't even have proper paragraph division. There are paragraphs that contain chapters inside themselves. How much of a mind twist is that? Wall of text of death! The narrative unravels in a feverish and dream-like state and never breaks from it. Nevertheless, I manage to finish reading this sucker. Oh! I am t...

Of course this futile standing around, this waiting around over and over again for days on end without any prospect of change, is wearying and fills you with despair and finally even makes you unable to do anything better than stand around in desperation.Oh Kafka, if only you had the confidence to finish this book. If only you didn't have a cruel and domineering father who made you feel as if your were nothing. If only you realized that you deserved the world and the world didn't deserve you. If...

"You misinterpret everything, even the silence." If this was Homeros, the castle would be unattainable Ithaka. If it was Borges, it would be a labyrinthine library full of books one can't read. If it was Freud, it would be a nightmare in which the dreamer tries to reach a nonexistent goal.But it is Kafka, and therefore it is a bit of all those stories, told in a meticulously described fog. As a symbol of life, it is depressing, and it leaves the reader to ponder what is worse: spending one's tim...

An extraordinary combination of beauty and subtle, paranoid horror - "growing inured to disappointment". Who else can make snow sinister (scary perhaps, but surely not sinister)? It ends in the middle of a sentence, more tantalisingly still, it ends with a mysterious old woman just about to say something... Very apt for a tale of layers of secrecy and never-ending frustration. It can be interpreted as an allegory for Jewish alienation and/or as a semi-autobiographical rendition of his relationsh...

It struck me round about page 200 that there was no particular reason for this novel to end, or for it to have been this long, rather it could have progressed near infinitely, a continuing unfolding of enigmatic conversations and meetings with assistant secretaries and children of under castellians, the promise of revelation growing balanced by the necessity of accepting the fundamental absurdity of the situation.I found I had to read this novel slowly, partly because of Kafka caused insanity, p...

Left unfinished at his death, Kafka's castle is as inaccessible as the top of Sisyphus' hill or any other utopia that one could imagine. The intricacies of the impenetrable bureaucracy is stupendous as is the terror of the unknown. Every bit as exciting as an Edgar Allen Poe tale or funny as Musil, it is one of Kafka's must important and enigmatic works.

I have loved this superb novel for a very, very long time. Perhaps you, too, have shrouded yourself in the endless folds of its inner mystery and adventure - and lost yourself within it!But WHY does it always seem to us so frustrating? So unsatisfying in the end? Is it because the Land Surveyor never gets to his Castle?Well - maybe there’s a DEEPER reason why he never arrives... something endemic to the functioning - or malfunctioning, of our ordinary minds.Let’s try to FIND OUT what it is.Now,

What a crying shame Kafka never got to finish what probably would have been his finest achievement. Certainly on an emotional level anyway. Kafka had a greater poignancy and a deeper feeling for his characters in The Castle when compared to the other works of his I have read, so it was extremely frustrating for this book to end right in mid-sentence. Damn!I knew it was going to happen, but how can one truly prepare one's self for a novel without an ending? Parts of me felt like it would have bee...

Is there a way to penetrate into high paces? Are high places really high? Keeping his eyes fixed upon the Castle, K. went ahead, nothing else mattered to him. But as he came closer he was disappointed in the Castle, it was only a rather miserable little tower pieced together from village houses, distinctive only because everything was perhaps built out of stone, but the paint had long since flaked off, and the stone seemed to be crumbling.Those who wield earthly power don’t sit high like Olympia...

Mr K arrives in the village where he is appointed surveyor; he discovers the castle, a central city, where the officials order, with the help of enigmatic circulars and without any spirit of responsibility, the collective life of the village below. To put up with it, except K., he wants to communicate with the castle from which he awaits its installation. He is impatient. He wishes to exercise his rights and exist as a responsible individual in legality, but this would imply a change in the esta...

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Claustrophobic Vision: "The Castle" by Franz Kafka, J.A. Underwood (Trans.)Genetics provides only the blueprint for a mind, and our brains are capable of reprogramming through learning and experience. If Kafka can so eloquently describe the complexity of the trap, you could see it as halfway to designing a means of improving the way we live. In “The Castle” Kafka describes K. climbing a wall as a child, not because he couldn't walk aro...

The Castle is an unfinished novel by Franz Kafka, concerning a protagonist known only as "K." who arrives in a village and struggles to reach the mysterious authorities of a castle.Dark and at times surreal, the story takes you away from your own life, with all its stress and secret desolations, only to return you, shattered, with more questions rather than answers.The Castle is the story of K, who claims to be a Land Surveyor, sent by someone unknown, for some purpose unknown, to the Castle