The Castle

The Castle is a novel of pure genius. The translation yields prose that’s exquisite. K must be among the all-time great fictional creations. Utterly addictive. Kafka’s comedic brilliance is displayed on every page. A literary gift.

“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.”

… as Bob Dylan once sang, in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”I’ve read two of Kafka’s major works twice: The Metamorphosis and The Trial, and have reviewed both. Franz Kafka was a German Jewish writer who was born and raised in Prague, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He would die young, at the age of 40, in 1924, and like some other writers, he would die of tuberculosis. His world view was worse than mere “gloomy.” There is this nightmarish quality to his writing: the lone protagonist, with the last name of “K,” locked in a struggle with a bureaucracy were all the rules, and all the people who espouse them, are “non-Euclidian,” as it were… operating in a geometry very different from the one that we were taught in school. And even those rules are shifting, “contextually.” And “K” never wanted to be there to begin with! His books resonate, since I have not only been there, but am there. Rare is the writer, Machiavelli, for example, whose last name has been turned into a word in the English language. Kafka is in that elite club. He is Kafkaesque.Thanks to a fellow Amazon reviewer who urged me to also read this work, I have again experienced the nexus between real world experience and the absurdity and existential angst of fight “the system” of Mitteleuropa of a century ago. K. is a surveyor, and has been hired by The Count of the Castle. He arrives in the village near the Castle, expecting to assume his new position. He immediately encounters the hostility of the villagers, not aimed at him specifically, but rather because he is an outsider, who does not understand the system or the power arrangements. But does anyone?The plot has two primary threads, naturally entangled. Like “The Trial,” there is K.’s dealings with the nightmarish bureaucracy, filled with idiosyncratic characters, who have their “prerogatives.” Is the messenger more important than his boss? K.’s meeting with the Mayor, in bed, with gout, is a classic. The Mayor infers that K.’s actual hiring may not have been authorized, that the bureaucracy is working on the issue, and that it is the most “trivial” of cases before it. The Mayor manages to stir in some threat and menace. Typical of Kafka’s layered style, concerning the messenger Barnabas: “But what were they to pardon him for, they answered; no charge had been brought, at least none had been entered in the records, at any rate not in the records available for public lawyers.” They do, indeed, try to keep it all hidden. There is what is available to the public, and, again as Kafka says: “I found out quite a lot from the servants about how to get taken on at the Castle by getting round the public recruitment process, which is difficult, and takes years…”Unlike “The Trial,” there is K’s relationship with women, commencing with the barmaid, Frieda, who was once Klamm’s mistress, and quickly became K’s fiancée. Barnabas has a couple of daughters who may, or may not be interested in K., and then there is the landlady. Towards the end of the work, I thought that Kafka made some interesting observations about Frieda, and her barmaid replacement (for a while) Pepi, as well as their customers.Serendipity, and those female relationships, present K. with the opportunity to pull back the curtain, a la The Wizard of Oz and see how power is actually distributed. Or perhaps not, as is Kafka’s style. And is K.’s own file that single sheet of paper? Nothing can be certain. After all, they are masters at keeping it all hid!This work was unfinished at Kafka’s death. He wanted all his works destroyed. The world owes Max Brod a debt of gratitude because he disobeyed his friend’s wish. This novel ends in mid-sentence. I do think a good editor would have substantially reduced its wordiness, and seemingly irrelevant tangents, such as the relationship of Frieda and Pepi. For Kafka’s work, 4-stars; for my real-world experience, as in “The Trial,” the jury is still out.

Of course there can be no doubt that Kafka left The Castle unfinished since it stops abruptly in mid-sentence, but after reading the work for the second time, I would like to call into question Kafka`s true motivations for leaving the work unfinished.The one true drawback to the castle as a literary work is that, at times, it becomes somewhat wordy and wandering, so that I propose the true reason for Kafka's abandoning the work in mid-sentence is not the fact that he didn't have time to finish it, but rather the fact that he didn`t know where it was going instead.The work has many interesting elements. It can be read as an allegory for society, outcasts, conformity, even as an examination of male/female relationships in examining Freida, K and Pepi, but really there's simply no logical way that The Castle could possibly have been concluded.