Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57122 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Synopsis
The story of K and his arrival in a village where he is never accepted, and his relentless, unavailing struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the castle that seems to rule it. K's Isolation and perplexity, his begging for the approval of elusive and anonymous powers, epitomises Kafka's vision of twentieth-century alienation and anxiety.

From the Publisher
'He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him' Vladimir Nabokov

About the Author
Franz Kafka:
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the state Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; The Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial, and The Castle.

Customer Reviews

Dark, Surreal, and Very Very Relevant
The Castle is more surreal and consequently more disturbing than Kafka's more famous novel, The Trial. The Castle appears to be an allegory for government bureaucracy and the law and in this respect will resonate with anybody that has dealt with government or a telephone company. It is a very dark story of a man's life of frustrations in the face of unrelentingly Byzantine bureaucracy.

This is my favourite Kafka novel and it is frustrating therefore that one must read it in translation, but mainly because Kafka never finished it, indeed it ends mid sentence. Kafka gave up on this book and it was Kafka's close friend Max Brod that completed it and to an extent commercialised it. But in a way, this chimes in with the unnerving narrative and is yet one more device to de-stabilise the reader.

Once read, The Castle will stay with you and you'll find yourself comparing much of what happens to you in modern life to the Sisyphus like existance of Joseph K.

A frustratingly pseudo-Kakfaesque review?
I came to read Kafka much later than I expected. And for reasons only half-known to myself I wrote my review even later. By then it seemed that there was no need for another review. And yet here is a review, which I find myself writing.

It is an irony that Kafka, once unknown, was considered SUCH a great literary figure by the time I came to know of him -- so much so that I expected to be disappointed with his work. And yet when I read it, I found it to be a work about disappointment!

One of the other reviewers may be correct in saying that the "Emperor has no clothes!". Yet how fine are his imaginary silks! Therein, for me, lies the genius of this novel. It never bluntly says "Look! Naked Emperor!"; instead it describes the imaginary silks with such artistic finesse that one is not quite sure if they are imaginary or not.

If this review made no sense to you, it is because I am not as great a writer as Kafka. But then that is a given, since I am merely a Reviewer and then not even one appointed as such.

Read the book and you might understand. Frustrating, no? It was for me! (Edited 6 times.)

Emperor's new clothes denounced
The story doesn't amount to much: K arrives at a village having been offered employment as a Land Surveyor by the local castle. But there seems to be no job for him, and he stumbles through a series of dreamlike days and nights trying to make sense of his new existence. The book is unfinished, and reaches no conclusion. In fact, the book could go on for ever.


The book makes little sense. K should have gone home as soon as the reality of his position came home to him. Some of the incidents are dreamlike, reminiscent of Alice. The two assistants, who seem to change shape and personality. The instant click with barmaid Frieda, engagement to her. The wealth of irrational and unexplained rules. And although the village seems very poor, no-one mentions money, and nobody ever pays for anything.

What is the author trying to say ? Is he making a point about bureaucracy ? Or about the numbing trivia of everyday life ? Whatever it is, he takes 400 pages of sledgehammer monotony to say it. Every page is leaden and uninspired. The sitcom Yes Minister told us more about bureaucracy in one 30-minute episode, and did it amusingly and watchably.

Or perhaps Kafka is complaining about the way people buttonhole you and pour out their troubles to you for hours on end without any consideration for how boring they are. This happens a lot in the book. At one point Olga talks incessantly for 14 pages to K. Kafka must have come across this a lot in his job as insurance man.

Whatever the intention, I think this book is a total failure, simply because it is so boring. There is hardly any variety in the narrative, everyone sounds exactly the same in the way they speak, hardly anything happens, and there is a minimum of description to liven up the narrative; and no-one goes anywhere except to other parts of the village.

I think it's about time Kafka's bubble was blown. I give this book a total raspberry.

One star because Kafka was an innovator. But like many innovators in literary forms, Kafka was superseded by others who improved on the form. (eg Jules Verne deserves recognition as an SF writer, even though his books are poor compared with those of his successors).