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Sunday, December 04, 2005

The Trial – Franz Kafka



I started reading this when I was… let’s say nineteen. I was enjoying it and all, but something else was bought, or given, or caught my eye from my shelf, and I put it to one side, convinced I’d finish it soon. Needless to say, I didn’t; my copy was within an edition of all of Kafka’s novels, and the tight print was unwelcoming. That was a near miss: I saved myself the shame of years of boring girls (I say “girls”, but frankly they were few and far between – allow me this license) about how amazing Kafka was, how his vision foreshadowed the totalitarianism that would afflict his country later on in the century. Christ, I might even have described him as "the quintessential twentieth century author". A lucky escape.

The other week I was thinking that I should read something Czech, something to get me in the mood for my upcoming trip to Prague. I had a skeet round Amazon then thought I’d go back and try this “Kafka”.

Someone, possibly Henry James, said something like, “tell a dream, lose a reader”. Well, The Trial is basically a dream – he almost lost me, but I thought I might as well get it over with. There’s a problem here: how much is intentionally “nightmarish”, designed to disorientate the reader, and how much is just shoddy plotting. The characterisation is poor, the actors’ motives obscure and capricious. “But that’s the point!” Yeah, maybe… The ending is sudden, as if you’ve woken from a dream, taken a round trip to the toilet, fallen back to sleep and missed some important development in that film running across your pillow. But it’s pretty good. It just passes my test of whether something is worth it – the reality is slightly different to what you imagined it would be.

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