The Trial
by Franz Kafka
231 pages
Schocken Books, August 2011 (reprint)
philosophical fiction/dystopian fiction/absurdist fiction
Read in 9 days
My Rating: ★★★★
My Review: I had several reasons for wanting to read this book, besides always wanting to read a book written by Franz Kafka, I’ve seen the movie of The Trial and want to compare them to each other. If you’ve ever seen an Orson Welles movie you will understand how intrigued I was to see if what Orson visualized was, in fact, what Franz wrote down? I am pleased to report the strangeness of Orson Welles adaptation of The Trial appears to be spot on when it comes to peculiarities.
You must first understand that The Trial was originally written in German, printed in 1925, and translated dozens of time. A lot of the authors original intent for their piece of work can get lost when it’s been translated as many times as this masterpiece has been. For the sake of not knowing anything about Kafka and his works I did read the LONG introduction that came along with the book. It’s not required in order to read The Trial but it was helpful. For instance, the fact that the chapters have no numbers, just titles, because one of the main mix-ups with the many hands this work passed through is it lost the order with which it was intended to be presented in. It also was never actually finished by Kafka! This shocked me the most since it is known (next to Metamorphosis) as the best thing he’s ever written.
What I found most interesting about this book is how it can easily be used as an explanation for how so many millions of people just blindly went along with what happened over 15 years after this work was published! I’ve always wondered what went on in the minds of those who were persecuted against that they never rose up against the Nazis? Joseph K.’s reaction to his being “arrested” and put on trial for a crime he claimed innocence of, without ever knowing the charge, serves as the best singular example. Multiply his compliance and acceptance by millions and there is as best an answer as I can see.
I also question the meaning behind the friendships he so easily makes with the many women he encounters in this book. I noticed that the women seem to genuinely want to help while the male characters seem hesitant, not wanting to risk guilt by association.
If you are going to read this book there are just a few items I’d like to bring to your attention. When translating this work from German to English there were a few liberties the translators had to take. For one, the addition of commas. You never know just how crazy a run on sentence can get if you don’t add them! And let me tell you, these sentences can end up being a paragraph long at times! Something I noticed right away. And speaking of paragraphs, they are just as few and far between as the commas were before translation. I’m someone who, if I can’t finish on a chapter before I have to stop reading, I’d like to at least finish off whatever paragraph I’m on. That plan was not possible with this book. I do not fault the original writer (who has a far superior and brilliant mind than my own) nor do I fault the translator (who truly did work painstakingly in order to preserve the authors original intent). I fault myself for being so darn picky!
Read it, love it, and before you file it away on your list of “Classic Books I’ve Read” check out the movie! Directed by Orson Welles, who also co-stars in it, alongside the ever creepy Anthony Perkins (if you don’t recognize the name, just think of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and you’ll know who I’m talking about).
Summary: This disturbing and vastly influential novel has been interpreted on many levels of structure and symbol; but most commentators agree that the book explores the themes of guilt, anxiety, and moral impotency in the face of some ambiguous force. Joseph K. is an employee in a bank, a man without particular qualities or abilities. He could be anyone, and in some ways he is everyone. His inconsequence makes doubly strange his arrest by the officer of the court in the large city where K. lives. He tries in vain to discover how he has aroused the suspicion of the court. His honesty is conventional; his sins, with Elsa the waitress, are conventional; and he has no striking or dangerous ambitions. He can only ask questions, and receives no answers that clarify the strange world of courts and court functionaries in which he is compelled to wander. The plight of Joseph K., consumed by guilt and condemned for a crime he does not understand by a court with which he cannot communicate, is a profound and disturbing image of man in the modern world. There are no formal charges, no procedures, and little information to guide the defendant. One of the most unsettling aspects of the novel is the continual juxtaposition of alternative hypotheses, multiple explanations, different interpretations of cause and effect, and the uncertainty it breeds. The whole rational structure of the world is undermined.
A respectable banker gets arrested and spends his life fighting a charge he can not get information about.
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