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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
I think I'm in awe of this novel. Something about it makes me believe that even though I should be slightly repelled by it, its episodic form, its incompleteness, its brutality in giving the straight facts of K.'s case. But by the end I knew I had experienced something, unique, something new, something revolutionary. To be fair, although I started it in a fervor one October morning, my progress did slow down considerably for weeks at a time, until this past weekend I read the second half of the novel with great intensity. During those weeks without diving into Kafka, I slightly pondered at the validity of this as a Great Modernist Novel: it's clunky, it's not very lyrical or flowing (at least in Muir's translation), and it has its aforementioned incompletion. But as I sped through the chapters with Huld, Leni, Titorelli, Block, the Prison Chaplain; and the descriptions of the strange legal process, the corruption of the Courts, Huld's own absurd attempt to win K. back, and that very long dissertation on the Doorkeeper parable, I realized that what made this incomplete, messy book something worth admiring was its ideas, its modernity, its foray into previously unknown genres - the absurd, the dystopian, and indeed the Kafkaesque. Of course Kafka's style is not to be ignored - however, the fluency of his sentences as I know is best appreciated in the original German, where not unlike Latin the object and verb are switched in position from our English standpoint. Even then, Kafka's prose is not meant to be cheery or helpful or beautiful: it's cold, it shows no mercy, it allows us to be shown the world his poor characters live in. When I started The Trial, I thought it would take me a while (it did, technically) because of the long chapters and long paragraphs. But despite this roadblock from easy resting points , I tunneled through with what little literary stamina I have and sped through nearly 200 pages of this book in 4 or 5 days. In this way Kafka (and in a sense Willa Muir) are great because he (and she) is able to make these intricate and ostensibly strange plots which keep the reader reeled in, while at the same time torturing them for their interest in the story with these unbroken descriptions and conversations - Kafka and Muir do not follow grammatical rules here by not allowing paragraph breaks in between different speakers, sometimes making following a conversation all the more confusing - and perhaps that's the point. Perhaps I'm looking into this too deeply, and Kafka did not intend the reading of his works to feel "Kafkaesque" in and of itself (although Kafka did not have the ability to know what "Kafkaesque" was, he invented it!) The only work of his I'd read before this of his was, of course, The Metamorphosis, and even then I read that in a couple days despite the similar lack of paragraph breaks, etc. (And the blindingly small prose font in my Norton Critical edition). With just The Metamorphosis to judge him on, I'd thought that Kafka was a rather good writer, and probably an important person in modernism's origins. But with The Trial - in my opinion as of now undoubtedly his posthumous masterpiece - I can see that he unintentionally made himself one of the most important and respected authors of the 20th century. Of course, I'll have to read The Castle (which I know many Kafka fans like more than Der Prozess), Amerika, and his other short stories. But I can definitely put The Trial in the top ranks of my favorite novels, and Kafka himself in that pantheon of my favorite authors, his metaphorical bust standing there besides Agatha Christie and Cormac McCarthy.
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Eines meiner Lieblingsbücher, mysteriös und auch Kafkas bester Roman ♡
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
The Trial has beautiful prose but left me feeling dejected and gloomy. The bleakness is laid on thick, chronicling the frustrations of futility when applying logic to the reality of the world we have constructed. A society we have constructed in an attempt to create some semblance of order, but leaves us lacking purpose and worthwhile fulfillment.
The Trial will not provide you with answers, but I think it is worth a read.
The Trial will not provide you with answers, but I think it is worth a read.
This is surpringly dense considering the size of the novel, mostly due to the fact that the speech is never indented, so each page is a wall of text. Utterly depressing, unsettling and crazy, and in a weird way, quite funny. The ending is sudden, as (like most of his work) the novel is unfinished. The ending is there, but there was supposed to be more chapters before it, leading to the final chapter. Thankfully, Kafka wrote this final chapter so there's closure, however sudden.
The paramount story of frustration and futility (although I think I was probably more frustrated than poor K.).