The Castle

Review of "The Castle" by Franz KafkaThis 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 powerandacceptance 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 MetamorphosisThe TrialAmerikaCollections:The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Classics Series)Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz KafkaBlue Octavo NotebooksKafka's Selected Stories (Norton Critical Edition)Give It Up: And Other Short StoriesGreat German Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)I highly recommend this book.

“It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. . .K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness.” Thus begins one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, written during the last two years of Kafka’s life while he was suffering from the chronic tuberculosis that eventually killed him in 1924, and first published in 1926 as Das Schloss with Max Brod’s significant deletions, changes, revisions and ‘corrections.’ This, however, is the Mark Harmon translation from Kafka’s actual original manuscript (i.e., without Brod’s alterations), which wonderfully captures both Kafka’s flowing, lucid, unpunctuated prose and the frenetic, anxious space of Kafka’s dreamworld.Kafka deftly sketches the stories and characters and scenes that consist of his dreamworld. Be forewarned: It’s a postmodern novel: there is no foreshadowing of events, no character development, no history behind any of the characters that inhabit this dreamworld; indeed, some denizens are not even characters, they are mere caricatures—just placeholders in Kafka’s dreamworld—for example, the two ‘Assistants’ that K. decides to call by the same name, or the ‘Peasants’ that frequently occupy space at the inns where K. seeks to find lodging.The Castle itself is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, “Keeping his eyes fixed upon the Castle, K. went ahead, nothing else mattered to him. But as he came close he was disappointed in the Castle, it was only a rather miserable little town, pieced together from village houses, distinctive only because everything was perhaps built of stone.” K. is summoned to the Castle as the new ‘surveyor.’ Yes, K. is surveying the landscape of his world, and publishing the truth of it for all the world to see, including all the corruption and internecine conflict that authoritarian bureaucracies suffer from. He is an outsider to that world, and he reports as a dissident: “K. did not hesitate to choose, nor would he have hesitated to do so even if he had never had certain experiences here. It was only as a village worker, as far from the Castle gentlemen as possible, that he could achieve anything at the Castle, these people from the village who were so distrustful of him.”It is not just with the people from the Castle that K. experiences anxiety, sometimes flowing intensely and other times ebbing to merely an undifferentiated dread, all these friendly characters presenting themselves to his consciousness: Olga, Barnabas, Frieda, Amalia, Pepi, the Landlady, the Commissioner, the Teacher, always perfectly sketched in their dreamlike essence, and always perfectly balanced in their ambiguous connection to K. Olga says to K., “But you’re spending the night with us,” to which K. replies, “To be sure” . . . “leaving it to her to interpret the words he had spoken.”