The Trial by Franz Kafka

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us" - Franz Kafka 

The Trial by Franz Kafka published 1925 is one of the great classics of world literature and Kafka one of the world's great writers.   I didn't find him an easy read though and the problem was not his writing style which I found very understandable but rather as with The Stranger by Albert Camus (and the resemblance between these two novels is uncanny),  I came to the end of The Trial disturbed and unsettled regarding what the author was trying to say.  This tends to be the case with many of the great modernist writers of the twentieth century, Kafka, Joyce, Camus, Woolf etc.  It's not all laid out on the table for you and as a reader you have to dig deeper.

And so as the Trial begins we are introduced to Joseph K who has just turned thirty.  He lives in a boarding house and works as a middle manager at a bank.  He leads a solitary existance.  No friends or family to speak of and on this particular morning he is waiting for his landlady to bring him breakfast.  Instead two men enter his room telling him that he is under arrest.  Joseph K is not told the charges, nor is he taken into custody.  He is simply told by these two officials to go about his daily life and the courts will be in touch with him:

"What kind of people were they?  What were they talking about?  Which department did they belong to?  After all, K had rights, the country was at peace, the laws had not been suspended - who, then, had the audacity to descend on him in the privacy of his own home?  He had always tended to avoid taking things too seriously, not to assume the worst until the worst actually happened  ... he could of course regard the whole thing as a joke, a crude joke his colleagues at the bank were playing on him for some unknown reason, perhaps because it was his thirtieth birthday".  

But it is no joke and its not long before Joseph K is told to report to the court.  He is  given the address where he is to appear but he is not told the time and so decides to arrive at 9:00 AM.  However, when he arrives he finds that the courtroom is housed in an old tenement building with so many rooms and stairwells that by the time Joseph K finds the right room he is late and berated by the magistrate.  This infuriates Joseph K and he goes on a tirade about the unfairness of the legal system.  He leaves the building and continues on as best he can working at the bank with his court case looming over him.

Joseph K reaches out to various people along the way, an attorney, a prison chaplain, a court painter and they all offer him advise on the best way to proceed with his trial but its confusing advise and no one will give Joseph K a straight answer about why he was arrested and what he did wrong.  Women play an odd role in The Trial as well.  Either Joseph K is trying to begin a relationship with them or they are making a pass at him but it never works out and for this I think we would need to know more about Franz Kafka's life.

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, Czech Republic to a German Jewish family.  His father, Hermann Kafka, was a tyrant according to his son, emotionally abusive, mocking Kafka's interest in literature, terrorizing him as a child, disapproving so strongly of Kafka's engagement to Felice Bauer that their relationship fell apart.  We know all this because in 1919 Kafka wrote his father a one hundred page letter in which he laid it all out.  Kafka never sent the letter but critics have speculated that the oppressive legal system that Joseph K encounters in The Trial where he is found guilty but never told his crime serves as a metaphor for Kafka's relationship with his father, although some have pointed out that when it comes to Kafka and his father we only have Kafka's side of the story.

But the Trial can be read in many ways.  An indictment on the legal system,  a criticism of nameless faceless bureacracies and critics have also noted the prophetic nature of the Trial published in 1925, two years after Kafka's death.  Franz Kafka may have written The Trial  to work out his own sense of guilt, depression and self doubt but The Trial also foresaw the nightmarish world about to descend on the 20th century with the rise of Nazism and then Stalinism.  The Trial is not a beach read but as with The Stranger by Camus, I finished The Trial wanting to learn more about Kafka and his writings.

The Trial fulfills book ten on my 2018 Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic by an author that's new to you.