The Trial

This is honestly the worst translation of a book that I have ever read, and I have read quite a few. Punctuation is missing, sentence structure is all but absent, and the end result is enough to make Kafka emerge from his grave and punish those who have so mistreated his work!
I do not even know what to do with this book. It is impossible to read, too awful to donate to the library; and yet, I cannot bring myself to destroy it. Guess there isn't much to do except to leave it in some boring waiting room, somewhere- God knows the world is full of those. I hope to find a translation that will do justice to this master, but realize that I might have to order a French one to avoid any further mishaps. The French would never tolerate this variety of literary butchery; they would rather reinstate the revolution and the guillotine, than to release such a bastardized version of a great literary work to the public!

(NOTE: This is a review of the book by Kafka, not this particular translation. I place it here because I feel this is the only place where it would be visible -- the other editions of the book on Amazon have almost no reviews. My translation, which I highly recommend, was by Willa and Edmin Muir in the 1984 Shocken paperback, which can be found here: [[ASIN:0805204164 The Trial]] .)

Such are the words of Titorelli, the eponymous artist of the "Painter" chapter in Kafka's classic novel of despair and confusion. Well, that's a bit disingenuous - all of Kafka's books were stories of despair and confusion, with the creeping and phantasmagoric horror of nightmares. Not all of them, however, have the hypnotic quality of The Trial, which even in its incomplete and fragmentary state manages to capture its protagonist's descent into madness (or enlightenment?) with a disconcerting precision.

The Trial is the story of K., who wakes up one morning in his boarding house room to find that agents of a mysterious Court want to arrest him for an unspecified crime. The arrest, however, seems as much a formality as an indictment - K. is allowed to live and work as normal while the proceedings of his case continue behind closed doors. K.'s attitude toward his case evolves as the process itself stagnates, running the gamut from hysteria to blasé dismissiveness to self-righteousness to (finally) despair. He comes across a set of characters whose lives are tangled inscrutably with the case and the mysterious Court, though Kafka does not focus on any one of them for long. In this way, the novel is episodic: we observe K.'s interactions with the Court and its functionaries in brief windows resembling short stories until, at last, the bureaucratic machinery ticks into place and K. finds himself confronting oblivion.

Part of the mystique of the book stems from our attempts to parse exactly what the Painter is on about. New or cursory readers of Kafka's book tend to place their emphasis upon the dystopian elements of the Court: its omnipresence, its irascibility, its brutal dismissal of K.'s human worth. While these are certainly valid observations, they do not fully capture the nature of the Court as Kafka describes it. For while it is certainly an oppressive and monolithic institution, it is also a massively dysfunctional one. K. observes to his disgust that this Court seems to have no one jurisdiction, with offices housed in the attics of tenements and abandoned buildings. Corruption seems to be rampant, and the bureaucratic measures taken by Court functionaries lack any methodology or sense. The particular brand of Bureaucratese that they speak smacks of a more benign Newspeak - less insidious only because one gets the impression the speaker doesn't know any more than you what he's talking about. During his conversations with lower functionaries, they assure him that the Lawyers and the Judges know the true nature of the Court; during his conversation with his experienced but senile Lawyer, however, it is revealed that experienced lawyers are so mired in the legal complexities of the system that they must often consult figures lower on the totem pole to try and get a sense of what any given case actually means. While we never do meet the Judges, who seem to be almost metaphysical figures, one gets the distinct impression that this incompetence goes all the way up to the top.

So what, then, is the Court? It becomes clear over the course of the story that Kafka isn't really talking about a court of law, or at least not exclusively. The Court appears in impossible places (a closet and a church among them), has functionaries whose jobs defy logic, issues indictments for a crime whose guilty verdict is inescapable except through delaying the case perpetually. We never do find out what K. is accused of, but there are tantalizing hints. If, after all, the Court is an at least partially metaphysical entity, then its jurisdiction must be the fundamental stuff of life. Indeed, every character in the book speaks in long, rambling dissertations that remind one of witness testimonies, as if they were documenting evidence for K.'s case. In a way, the specific charge does not matter: as a parable told toward the end of the book demonstrates, the point seems to be that Justice - as an abstract ideal, as something to strive for - is ultimately unattainable. It is only with this sentiment in mind that the dysfunctions of the Court (in spite of its seeming absolute power), K.'s inability to have a true romantic relationship with Ms. Burstner, and the various conflicted states of the many characters all make a sort of twisted sense - the universe they inhabit is inherently predisposed against consummation and catharsis, dooming them instead to anxiety and despair. It is a nightmare's anarchy, the meaningless chaos of a fever dream. Perhaps K.'s only real crime is that he exists, and that is enough.

And so we are left wondering: if this is the state of the world sketched in The Trial, could it also be the state of our own universe? Are all our institutions - spiritually and worldly, political and philosophical - doomed to the uselessness of the Court by the very nature of existence? Kafka provides no concrete answers, only dream-logic and the inescapable sensation of acute despair. Albert Camus, according to the back cover of my edition, once said, "Everything in [The Trial] is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety." A fitting analysis, but misleading in that Kafka was no philosopher, much less an existentialist. Kafka's genius was his ability to express the spiritual core of Camus' or Sartre's Big Ideas - existential despair, the Absurd, Authenticity and the lack thereof, etc. - in stories that make one feel them rather than just understand them intellectually. He had no need of Theory; an expert of the macabre fable, he needed only his own tortured experience and the limitless expanse of his imagination.

After being enthralled with many of Kafka's short works, especially the parable "Before the Law" contained herein, I was extremely disappointed, and dare I say, bored with The Trial. It is not until K's Conversation with the priest in the cathedral leading up to "Before the Law" does the book become interesting. Sure, the book is philosophically brilliant, but the unbroken streams of dialog resulting in laboriously long paragraphs, combined with an impotent narrator and lifeless prose result in a tenouous grip on the reader's interest. The lifeless prose may initially be attributed to translation but familiarity with Goethe and Remark and their lyrical mastery of language seem to defy this. Due to his position as Everyman the lack of character development in K. is certainly understood but it is yet one more factor that contributes to making The Trial an unsatisfactory read.

Although this book was written a long time ago, I find it very relevant to our time.
Franz Kafka in his unique writing style describes how an individual can feel lost in a world that sometimes seems to have no meaning or order.

I think that we all feel it sometimes and that's why this book is such a great read.

This is my first Kafka. Typically, I will not read the same author twice (don't ask), but I am definitely hungry for more.

This book is like some wild ride, and can be deemed relevent to nearly any scenario it is applied to. I read this with a book group and each member derived different meanings from it. I had great fun trying to decide what exactly it meant to Kafka. I am surprised that he did not find this book worthy of publication.

I would recommend this book to fans of allegory and to literature students looking for a book that is ripe for interpretation. I would not recommend this book to anyone in the mood for a book that is neatly packaged and wraps up nicely.