The Castle

Review of "The Castle" by Franz Kafka This book made me into a Kafka admirer. He brings life to characters in otherwise drab situations and makes them seem very real. The reader feels the frustration, absurdity, the pettiness and the powerlessness in a personal way. You feel the haughtiness and aloofness of the Castle staff as if they were a part of your own community. You feel the pettiness and delusional gossip of the townspeople as if you were seeing it first hand. The story is riveting and the pace seems fast even when there is little action. The story starts with the protagonist (identified only by his initial, K.) walking to what sounds like a routine surveying job. Soon he is frustrated by a very confusing series of obstacles. As the story develops the obstacles become more chaotic. K.'s original purpose in going to the castle is never fully elaborated and his motives seem lost or stolen. The forces acting upon K. are shrouded. It seems as if some invisible force has plotted to test K. to the limit of human endurance of tolerance of ambiguity. Kafka combines the themes of: social class commentary, alienation from a heartless social system, absence of any protective power, salvation, redemption, fear of strangers, fear of change, search for the meaning of life, inscrutability of authorities, indifference of forces ruling human fate, persistence in the face lost purpose, abuse of power and acceptance of pointlessness goals. As the plot progresses it takes on a surreal nightmare quality. Is the protagonist having a nightmare, going insane or confronting the reality of his situation? There is no end to the frustration. We are never told if K. is having a nightmare or going insane. We never discover why K. is so determined to enter the castle that he would tolerate and even join in to the absurdity. His original purpose of doing a surveying job could never justify his struggle to gain admittance. We are left seeing K. as a perpetual outsider. Perhaps Kafka is telling us that there is no end or limit to frustration, alienation and absurdity. Those seeking an answer to the ageless enigma of existence will never find a simple resolution. This is a disturbing work that challenges conventional notions of plot and character development while testing the readers conception of his/her purpose in life. The Castle will confront the reader in unexpected ways and raise emotional personal issues that would otherwise be repressed. See: The Metamorphosis The Trial Amerika Collections: The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Classics Series) Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka Blue Octavo Notebooks Kafka's Selected Stories (Norton Critical Edition) Give It Up: And Other Short Stories Great German Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) I highly recommend this book.

Franz Kafka was obsessed with dreams, and THE CASTLE is his attempt to depict the modern world of corporate and governmental bureaucracy as a crazed nightmare. The novel possesses the logic of dreams, and there is a dreamlike quality to everything that happens in the book. As in a dream, people and situations transform effortlessly into something entirely different, as when one of the young, silly assistants of the protagonist K. suddenly appears to be a much older, decrepit man. Though his transformation is absurd, it is part and parcel of the logic of the village dominated by The Castle.I first read this novel years ago when the only option in translation was the Muir translation. This new complete translation, which includes a large section that Kafka's friend and literary executor Max Brod decided to excise, transforms the novel into an entirely different book. For one thing, the section that Brod left out indicates even more vividly the degree to which the novel is concerned with depicting the more horrific aspects of modern bureaucratic life. For another, the manner in which the text simply breaks off in mid-sentence reinforces the nightmarish quality of the book, for just as we wake up from a dream, never able to complete the tale, so we break away from the narrative, never knowing what K.'s fate is.The novel contains more a situation than a plot. K., a surveyor, arrives in a village having been hired by the local Castle, presumably to survey. Instead, K. quickly learns that he may not have been hired at all, and manages to break rapidly a number of laws of which he was utterly unaware and whose logic is far from obvious. In this way we see Kafka exploring one of the great themes of his literature: that all individuals are guilty until proven innocent, and that we have no idea what it means to be innocent. K.'s plight becomes more and more absurd and confused all the way until the point at which Kafka ceased working on the novel. That Kafka gave up working on the novel isn't completely surprising. His method of writing was to growth the text like one would a plant, not necessarily knowing where the story was going, but instead allowing it to develop as it wished. Unlike virtually every other great writer of the past two hundred years, Kafka was almost completely unconcerned with either character development or with plot. It wasn't that he was bad at character: it simply didn't concern him. He was far more interested in pure situations, as if they were thought experiments. For instance, what would happen if a man awoke one morning to find that he had been transformed into a giant beetle? Or, what would happen if someone were accused of a crime, but knew neither accuser, the crime of which he is being accused, or where his trial was to be held? Or, what would happen if a man showed up in a village to work as a surveyor, but discovered that he had neither a position nor means to contact those who had hired him?One reading

This is perhaps one of the hardest books I've read. The sentences stretch for lines, and the paragraphs take entire chapters. but don't let these deterr you: this style only helps to create this existential nightmare, makes it more dream-like. Absurdity abounds this book: K.'s struggle to get to talk to Klamm is rebuked countless times, making him start over again. Pepi's dream to have Frieda's position is merely taken away by Fireda, thus making her start over. And Frieda's plans of are merely thrown away. Martin Buber's philosophy is, perhaps, a greater theme in this book. If you are not familiar with I AND THOU, I recomend reading it, because his philosophy gives the greatest explanation as to why nothing was accomplished. And being familiar with Kierkegaard greatly helps to lead tyo some sort of an understanding behind this enigmatic work. I loved this book and hated alll at once. I may not call it Kafka's masterpeice, though, because I still have to read THE TRIAL. THE CASTLE is hard to get through, but it is worth the effort.

There are so many levels to Kafka's writing, it's hard to write about his masterpiece in such a small space. The Castle is a book that shows a political system the people cannot get in touch with, never really see, and can only guess at. This was written around 1920, pre-Orwell, pre-Huxley, even pre-Anthem, a distopia novel that is better than any others. Kafka's citizens, like America's, can never really contact the Castle like how we cannot ever really contact our castle, the white house, directly. This book may even be considered a work of prophesy by one of the greatest geniuses to ever live. Another great thing about this book is how is shows nothing ever beginning or ending. K. tries to get to the Castle, doesn't; K. fires his assistants, he sees them again; K. is accepted as the surveyor, he is denied... Nothing seems to have a point, but that in itself is the point. Life is just and endless round of disappoints and no no clear cut endings or beginnings. Life is absurd, and while we may laugh at the antics of the assistants at first, doesn't it get kind of creepy after a while, kind of like you KNOW people like that, people who you can see through but everyone else loves for some reason? This book is dense, long, and very dark. It may also be (next to Ulysses) the most important work of fiction of the twentieth century, showing us how absurd and useless are lives really are. No one can ever reach the castle, it stands in sight, but we can never achieve the enlighenment or promminence nessicary to get inside. Kafka's genius will astound you, but I would suggest reading The Trial and some of the short stories before attempting to tackle this difficult work. It pays to be "in the Kafka know" when reading The Castle, it'll be much more enjoyable.

Probably not the most recommendable place to start for someone unfamiliar with Kafka, but if you've read other works by Kafka and have enjoyed them, you'll need to get around to this one eventually. Personally, I think it's one of the best books I've ever read. It is true that nothing much really happens, in the typical sense, and that the book is distinctly unfinished and probably flawed on a number of levels. But in some senses this only enhances the mysterious nature of the book. It is utterly surreal and ultimately pointless as a conventional narrative, but rather resembles an epic, highly detailed, inherently meaningful, yet hopelessly ambiguous dream. I find this mix and this atmosphere extremely appealing, and I have never seen it in a purer, more innocently perfect form than here. A book full of magic.