Trial

by Franz Kafka

Summary

Kafka's exploration of the psychological terror inherent in everyday life is both allegorical and stunningly realistic. A bank employee named Joseph K. is accused of a crime he not only did not commit but doesn't even understand. He is released, but thereafter enslaved to a legal system that requires him to continue to go to court to defend his innocence in a case that is never explained, never resolved. Try though he may to take control of the situation, the hero's life, revealed in all its barrenness, disintegrates not only at the bank where he works but in his relationship with a young woman and with his landlady. Finally, in a last absurd twist, he is executed. Kafka expressed the wish that THE TRIAL never be published, but thanks to the intervention of his literary executor, Max Brod, it appeared posthumously. It is considered a classic of modernist literature, an early existential work that has had enormous influence on most serious 20th-century writers.

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Media Reviews

"Here we are taken to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in a true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety....It is the fate, and perhaps also the greatness, of this work that it leaves open all possibilities and confirms none."    -- Albert Camus

"This short novel has passed into far more than classical literary status...In more than one hundred languages the epithet 'Kafkaesque' attaches to the central images, to the constraints of inhumanity and absurdity in our times...It is in this diffusion of the Kafkaesque into so many recesses of our private and public existence, that 'The Trial' plays a commanding role."    -- George Steiner

"...an ardent incantation of reality, an urgent formulation of the question of religious existence."    -- Hermann Hesse

"Kafka's 'Trial' defies rational interpretation. The realism of its images exceed the power of one's imagination..."    -- Andre Gide

"...I have read 'The Trial', and not in a long time have I come upon a novel which, without being in any vulgar sense spectacular, is more astonishing....It keeps one foot so solidly on the ground that you can think of few books which stay there more firmly with both feet. But its other foot swings far out into space, conferring upon the literal action of the story a depth of meaning-or if meaning if often elusive, a power of suggestion-which can best be called visionary....No summary can convey the atmosphere which Kafka cunningly distills..."    -- Louis Kronenberger

   -- New York Times Book Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 1987

Other Editions

• Hardcover Reprint - Random House Inc (1992) - from $9.99
• Paperback Illustrated - Schocken Books (1988) - from $3.00

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