Language: English
Published in: 1925
Categorie(s): Fiction, Literary
Translator: David Wyllie
Word count: 84,114 words (≈ about 6 hours)
Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70.
The Trial (German: Der Process) is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime.
According to Kafka's friend Max Brod, the author never finished the novel and wrote in his will that it was… (more)
A list of utopia/dystopia books.Utopia is a fictional island near the coast of the atlantic ocean written about by Sir Thomas More as the fictional...
A selection of books with absurd in mind.
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Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:15:11 +0200
The Trial was not an enjoyable read for me. The dense and surreal prose was arduous and while I can appreciate the effect of the writing and how the style added to the feeling of the scenes I did find it a struggle at times. Many of the scenes are dreamlike with bizarre and strange things happening. I found the bizarreness and randomness made for a heavy-going reading experience.
I'm sure I missed and didn't 'get' what others find so compelling about the book. I imagine that each of the characters… (more)
The Trial was not an enjoyable read for me. The dense and surreal prose was arduous and while I can appreciate the effect of the writing and how the style added to the feeling of the scenes I did find it a struggle at times. Many of the scenes are dreamlike with bizarre and strange things happening. I found the bizarreness and randomness made for a heavy-going reading experience.
I'm sure I missed and didn't 'get' what others find so compelling about the book. I imagine that each of the characters that K. meets is an allegory of some element of culture or bureaucracy. I'm sure that if I had worked hard enough I could have found meaning to many of the strange events and characters. There are many interpretations to the book and different readers can find different meanings in the text. For me it was just too tedious to enjoy or want to think about.
It's also worth noting that the book was never completely finished by Kafka - one of the chapters is incomplete and it's uncertain whether Kafka actually intended other chapters to be written. He certainly never got to edit his work so it is rough round the edges as a consequence.
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