a book

The Trial

Name: The Trial
Rating: 5 (8 reviews)
Author: Franz Kafka
ISBN: 9781612931036

Franz Kafka · 2001 · 158 pages

"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term "Kafkaesque"." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment - based on an undisclosed charge - in a maze of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks. Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's engrossing parable about the human condition plunges an isolated individual into an impersonal, illogical system. Josef K.'s ordeals raise provocative, ever-relevant issues related to the role of government and the nature of justice.

recommended by 8 people

sourced from public statements

David Heinemeier Hansson
“Five novels I think about all the time - 1984: States crave control - The Trial: Bureaucracies eats people - The Stranger: Alienation is a vantage point - Animal Farm: Revolutions usually corrupt - Brave New World: Caste systems fence morality”↗
Jon Fosse
“Another writer writing in German around the same time as when Trakl wrote his poetry was Franz Kafka. His most famous, and best novel, is The Trial. I also read this as a young man, and this novel, and the writing of Kafka in general, remains the literature that has impressed me the most. My own translation of The Trial was published in Norway recently. I have also translated a selection of his stories, that may well be the best he wrote. Kafka changed the way we look at the world, and in so doing, changed the world.”↗
Kara Swisher
Susan J. Fowler
Michael Peel
Ben Bland
Stanley Corngold
Frank Chimero