Summary
Franz Kafka: The Castle
Geometer K. will not give up the fight, but in the end he will falter and die of exhaustion. - In short, according to Max Brod, to whom Kafka verbally entrusted it, the unfinished novel The Castle should have been finished. And while learning about the ending of a novel does not encourage reading, on the contrary, this retold outcome seems to have the opposite effect, giving the book an additional charm. And how could it not be, when it is a class work of a class author, his usual masterpiece, we would say, as is, after all, everything he wrote. For support, here are a few of Kafka's typical "Kafkaesque" sentences from the Castle: "So he moved forward again, but the road was long. The main country road did not, in fact, lead towards the hill with the castle. It only approached it, but then it seemed to deliberately turn, so if it did not move away from the castle, it did not lead closer to it either..."
Although the author's idea was not to write a mere parody of the bureaucratic system, with which the lawyer Kafka encountered abundantly in his daily life, let him pray for another Trial, the comparisons still arise: the ill-fated heroes K. and Josef K. are destined by their very existence to be victims of crooked systems, but while Josef K. tries to evade the law and the authorities, K., just as hopelessly, tries to get closer to them. Thus, the main protagonist here neither has access, nor can he really get close, let alone step into the mysterious castle from which the bizarre village and its inhabitants are managed, among whom K. becomes and remains an intruder, "a stranger out of the number"...
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.