I read The Trial and everything else I could find by Kafka while living a couple of tram stops away from his grave in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague in 2004. The New Jewish Cemetery was opened in 1891 as the Old Jewish Cemetery was full – the vast open space in the lower half of the grounds tells a story more grim than anything found in pre-war fiction. But anyway.
The Trial isn’t my favourite Kafka (that would be The Castle) – but it sums up a lot of what keeps me coming back to his books. What I love most of all is the complete repudiation of free will and meaningfulness in the universe. It’s something many writers play with, but I can think of nobody else who accepts it so completely, and without any sense of melodrama.
Recommended listening: this episode of the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Franz Kafka’s novel of power and alienation ‘The Trial’, in which readers follow the protagonist Joseph K into a bizarre, nightmarish world in which he stands accused of an unknown crime; courts of interrogation convene in obscure tenement buildings; and there seems to be no escape from a crushing, oppressive bureaucracy.
Kafka was a German-speaking Jew who lived in the Czech city of Prague, during the turbulent years which followed the First World War. He spent his days working as a lawyer for an insurance company, but by night he wrote stories and novels considered some of the high points of twentieth century literature. His explorations of power and alienation have chimed with existentialists, Marxists, psychoanalysts, postmodernists – and Radio 4 listeners, who suggested this as our topic for listener week on In Our Time.