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squid_vicious 's review for:
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
I was sitting in my office’s kitchenette, reading this book while stuffing sushi in my mouth. A colleague of mine walked by and asked me what the book was about, so I told him “It’s about a guy who gets arrested for an unspecified crime he doesn’t know he committed, and tries to untangle the bureaucratic net he’s been caught in.” My colleague asked me if it was inspired by real events. I predictably replied: “Sure, it was inspired by what it’s like to work here.” As you may guess, I am my office’s joker.
Anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation is probably vaguely familiar with the headspace that the unfortunate protagonist of “The Trial”, Joseph K., finds himself in: everything is complicated, everyone is working on it, but at the same time, nothing seems to get done, the information is always insufficient or not filed according to procedure… At the end of that day, you feel like you have worked so hard and somehow, nothing is really resolved and you wonder why you spend so much physical, emotional and intellectual energy on this thing… Kafka wrote this novel almost a hundred years ago and yet this weird dysfunctional grind could not sound more contemporary.
As I was reading « The Trial », it was impossible for me not to visualize the events as if they were taking place in a Wes Anderson movie. Something about the general absurdity, the almost caricatural descriptions of the various characters, and that formal but un-hinged tone just brought that visual style to my mind. Certainly, the subject matter is not funny in and of itself: bureaucracy is a fascinating and horrifying machine that does its best to crush the human spirit in its cogs, but there is definitely a point at which the only sane reaction is to laugh.
My husband and I are currently waiting for his permanent residency application to be finalized by the Canadian government, and the convoluted, inexplicable and often arbitrary sounding procedures the poor K. must follow was an interesting reminder of the various hoops we have had to jump through in the past year. It was all a pain in the ass, but now we mostly just look back on it laughing, and congratulating ourselves we survived the process.
I’ve read many theories that address the metaphors to be found in “The Trial” and while I think they are fun to think about (the German word for trial is the same word they would use for “process”, so maybe the book is about an internal psychological process; the arrest is on the morning of K.’s thirtieth birthday, so maybe this is about the endless complications of adulthood; life is just a series of senseless trials and tribulations… I could go on, but you get the idea), I also didn’t enjoy the experience of reading this book enough to indulge in them too much. It was a fast and easy read, and while I am aware that it meandered and droned on completely deliberately, to put the reader in K.’s head, I was glad to get it over with. I still think it belongs on my “mandatory reads” shelf, if only because this book is so seminal, and referred to ad nauseum in both literature and pop culture: you need to read this so you can be obnoxiously accurate when you declare that something is Kafkaesque.
Anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation is probably vaguely familiar with the headspace that the unfortunate protagonist of “The Trial”, Joseph K., finds himself in: everything is complicated, everyone is working on it, but at the same time, nothing seems to get done, the information is always insufficient or not filed according to procedure… At the end of that day, you feel like you have worked so hard and somehow, nothing is really resolved and you wonder why you spend so much physical, emotional and intellectual energy on this thing… Kafka wrote this novel almost a hundred years ago and yet this weird dysfunctional grind could not sound more contemporary.
As I was reading « The Trial », it was impossible for me not to visualize the events as if they were taking place in a Wes Anderson movie. Something about the general absurdity, the almost caricatural descriptions of the various characters, and that formal but un-hinged tone just brought that visual style to my mind. Certainly, the subject matter is not funny in and of itself: bureaucracy is a fascinating and horrifying machine that does its best to crush the human spirit in its cogs, but there is definitely a point at which the only sane reaction is to laugh.
My husband and I are currently waiting for his permanent residency application to be finalized by the Canadian government, and the convoluted, inexplicable and often arbitrary sounding procedures the poor K. must follow was an interesting reminder of the various hoops we have had to jump through in the past year. It was all a pain in the ass, but now we mostly just look back on it laughing, and congratulating ourselves we survived the process.
I’ve read many theories that address the metaphors to be found in “The Trial” and while I think they are fun to think about (the German word for trial is the same word they would use for “process”, so maybe the book is about an internal psychological process; the arrest is on the morning of K.’s thirtieth birthday, so maybe this is about the endless complications of adulthood; life is just a series of senseless trials and tribulations… I could go on, but you get the idea), I also didn’t enjoy the experience of reading this book enough to indulge in them too much. It was a fast and easy read, and while I am aware that it meandered and droned on completely deliberately, to put the reader in K.’s head, I was glad to get it over with. I still think it belongs on my “mandatory reads” shelf, if only because this book is so seminal, and referred to ad nauseum in both literature and pop culture: you need to read this so you can be obnoxiously accurate when you declare that something is Kafkaesque.