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A review by theanonymoses
The Trial by Franz Kafka
5.0
It's usually impossible to venture into a Kafka novel without already having preconceived ideas and theories about what the Kafkaesque entails. Rather than shading my expectant experience, the absence of these notions gave my reading a different colour altogether. I found Kafka's writing to be wryly humorous. Something I hadn't thought of associating with him. It turns out, when Kafka invited his friends to a reading of the first chapter of The Trial - they laughed!
Coming to the novel, what makes the circumstances of K.'s arrest severe is not the denial of providing him a reason or an explanation for it, but K.'s conduct in the light of this unexpected situation. The way guilt operates insinuatingly during an incomprehensible situation. Instead of impairing the order of things, one plays into it, abandoning the possibility and foreknowledge of innocence. Kafka's choice of setting is often grim and dense. And even this is exalted by the lucid prose of elaborate dialogue. The theological allusions drawn may subsume the entire novel, and yet it remains outside of it.
One is inclined to read into Kafka's evocation of bureaucracy as a projection of totalitarian nightmare. As tempting as that proposition is, the novelist deserves primacy. Kafka is no prophet; he's only a genius novelist.
Coming to the novel, what makes the circumstances of K.'s arrest severe is not the denial of providing him a reason or an explanation for it, but K.'s conduct in the light of this unexpected situation. The way guilt operates insinuatingly during an incomprehensible situation. Instead of impairing the order of things, one plays into it, abandoning the possibility and foreknowledge of innocence. Kafka's choice of setting is often grim and dense. And even this is exalted by the lucid prose of elaborate dialogue. The theological allusions drawn may subsume the entire novel, and yet it remains outside of it.
One is inclined to read into Kafka's evocation of bureaucracy as a projection of totalitarian nightmare. As tempting as that proposition is, the novelist deserves primacy. Kafka is no prophet; he's only a genius novelist.