The Trial

Re-read this for a book club. I liked it because I like pretty much everything Kafka so it was easy to go back and take this novel for a second spin.

I loved the darkness, the futility, the absurdity, the strangeness that is Kafka. If you love Kafka, you will definitely love this book.

The element about an evil totalitarian bureaucracy reminds me of [b:The Overcoat|537094|The Overcoat|Nikolai Gogol|https:images.gr-assets.com/books/1448040003s/537094.jpg|13183177] by Nikolai Gogol, but I liked that one better. While I appreciate the message about how insidious bureaucracy is, and there was something interesting about the dream-like quality of this novel where nothing exactly makes sense and things happen as if the protagonist conjures up the next act.

“It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

Still, it simultaneously felt meandering, dull, and absurd.

And I get that there’s a message about life itself. Life is a lot like a conviction in which we are not told what we did to deserve our punishments. But I need a class to understand everything Kafka is saying in this story. There are lots of writers and stories that don’t make this so hard on us.

But I understand this, and this is one of my favorite quotes:

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”

I like it at first then it just lost me, it was a fight to finish the book.

Good book with important insights, but excessively opaque. Like other novels from other authors, it would be interesting to have Kafka rewrite the book in the first person. It may have been an even more effective way at getting to his "alone in a crowd" theme. I haven't spent any time reading others' critiques or descriptions of the story, but I'm sure the opacity of the narration was very deliberate in order to support the overall idea of the book. I get it, but it made me work harder to follow along than I felt was necessary. That aside, what an overall statement about what we've become as a "civilized" society - and this was written over a century ago. "Kafkaesque" has since been added to my vocabulary, and now comes to mind as apt way too often. I may not be a flat out post-modernist, but this book reminds me that we've crossed from a functional, just society into something else in may ways. I see some parallels between The Trial and the Jason Bourne novel/movie franchise. Film noir (ish) protagonists thrown into solitude despite being surrounded by bustling cities. Now that I think about it, you could also add Hopper's paintings to that idea, IMHO. All of these resonate really well with me. Quick footnote. At the risk of raising a well worn trope, the screen version didn't deliver. Orson Welles went back to the well too many times on "weird" and "confusing" and delivered something quite different. Not a bad movie in it's own right, but disappointing following the book. That never happens, right?