While his previous two works, "From the Ground Up: A Study of the Use of Prepositions in The Dramatic Works of Nikolai Gogal," and "Metamorphosis," were both gloriously academic and even enjoyable, Mark M. Anderson scores with his newest! (Although I did find his insect to human thing interesting.) "Kafka's Clothes..." gives us an indepth view into the wardrobe of this guy Franz Kafka. I particularly enjoyed the long descriptions of his Wednesday sweater, an article of clothing that echoes vaguely of the modern day sweater-vest. The guy, Franz Kafka, wore a lot of neutrals, mostly like tweed and wool. Anderson gives wonderful insight into the sock drawer not only of the guy but of the time. Engaging. Brilliant? Also, not to be missed is chapter four's retelling of "The Pied Piper." I had no idea that the guy playing the flute was blonde. Who knew?

Composed of myriad primary sources, Conrad prefaces each document with a description, date and summary of the following text. Organized topically and then chronologically within each section, the format perfectly suits the researcher. Interestingly, (for my purposes) the text contains numerous accounts of quilombos in Palmares, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and others. The documents date from 1550 (approx.) through the final proclamation ending slavery in Brazil in 1888. Outstanding research tool, as well as an interesting read for those wishing to learn, first hand, about slavery in Brazil.

This book gave me a very rare experience:

"The Trial" has been one of my favorite books since high school, and I've read it many times, studied it in college, and kept it by my bed for years. I thought I understood it as well it could be understood. This book by Robertson absolutely floored me by showing me that the usual interpretation-- that Joseph K. is a poor, everyday kind of guy beset on all sides by a creepy court that deliberately and without reason tortures his mind and finally breaks him-- is DEAD WRONG. Robertson has convinced me beyond any doubt that not only is K. guilty, but the Court is trying to save him from himself!

As fantastic as this interpretation might seem, Robertson's evidence is utterly convincing. You must read this book. Once you see Robertson connect the dots-- the clues Kafka leaves for the reader, but which even college professors don't notice-- your understanding of "The Trial" will change forever.

Look at it this way: what if The Court is not any kind of legal, temporal court, but a court of morality? Though we see the book's events through Joseph K.'s eyes, he is a horrible, cruel, self-centered man. Nearly every thought he has, and every word he speaks to anyone else is derogatory, condescending, and plain mean. He sees and treats all women as whores. All men he treats as stupider than himself. Any decent, moral thought he has is immediately driven out of his mind by his arrogance.

AND-- "Der Prozess" is only one of the seven chapters in this revelatory book by Robertson. Anyone who enjoys Kafka's work and wants to understand it better should get a copy of this book. The level of knowledge and analysis is astonishing.

My one beef with this translation is that all the direct quotations from Kafka's works are left in German. If you don't speak German, your use of this book will be somewhat hampered. I know enough German to be able to figure out what paragraph is printed in the Robertson, so that I can find that paragraph in Kafka and read it in translation.

este pequeno cuento acerca de la extrana conversion de un hombre en un insecto cabria muy bien dentro de la literatura de lo fantastico, donde la suspension de la realidad parece no afectar a los personajes y donde las cosas mas extranas van haciendose cotidianas. es asi como la familia pasa de la inicial sorpresa a la costumbre y despues al tedio para acabar con la muerte de su protagonista. me parecio una metafora sobre alguien que repentinamente cae enfermo para sorpresa de los familiares y despues entra en la etapa final para descanso suyo yde sus familiares que secretamente ansian su muerte...

Gregorio Samsa es el hombre que al despertar una mañana se encuentra convertido en algo muy parecido a una cucaracha. El ser humano reflejado en sus miedos y miserias, se acostumbra a ser cargado simbólicamente por su familia que no puede evitar ser testigo de su deterioro metamorfósico. Este fue el libro que permitió a García Márquez despegar su subversión creativa puesto que en él, la literatura del siglo XX, asume la ficción fantástica como garantía de lo posible y con ello, de lo verosímil. Gregorio Samsa podemos ser cada uno de nosotros, lectores contemporáneos, que en cualquier mañana encontramos la posibilidad de interrogar por qué y para qué existimos.

Each letter of the Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament) alphabets have a standard numeric value assigned them. By taking the spelling of a word or phrase from the scriptures and then taking the sum of the numeric values, astonishing correlations can be seen. Many key phrases, for example are multiples of 111, which is the number of God. Jesus, spelled in Greek, for example, totals 888.

ANOTHER CODE has been discovered.In this code, the numeric value of a word is taken and then that number is looked up in the Old or New Testament lexicon, revealing amazing correlations, further evidencing God's hand in the authorship of the Bible.

Word 888 in Greek, for example, means "useless," which is how Jesus was treated by his own. Word 890 in Hebrew (just two after) includes the word "useless" in its definition. The theomatic value of the Hebrew spelling of Messiah is 358. Zodhiates (NT Greek Dictionary) gives "useless" as a synonym of word 358 in Greek.

In all my years I've never read a more thrilling account of Kafka's relation to the Western literary tradition. This is the sort of thing Stephen King might write if comparative literature was his field. Schur's insight about the role of the path in the Western canon was so profound that when I first read it I slid out of my rocking chair onto the floor. Fantastic.

The Trial is a book that draws you into its sea of words and never lets you rise back up to the surface. Once immersed in its content, you do not want to place it back down until you have finished it. "The Trial," is about man enslaved trying to become truly free. It is about the cruelty of life and man's failure in trying to find some importance, some meaning, some salvation that is inaccessible in the physical world.

Well, I've just finished reading The Trial for the sixth, maybe even eighth time, and as usual my brain is buzzing with all the unanswered questions and unspoken quandaries that this book embeds in the reader's mind.
An aside - this is the first time I have read this particular translation, having read the Muir's work before. Perhaps this translation is a bit livelier, and the chapters, or sequences, are grouped a bit differently, but the general experience of reading and digesting this book was much the same as with the Muir's version. One caution, if you are a first time reader do not read the introduction first. The author gives away much too much of the story and ending in the introduction.
Now, back to the book itself. As "they" say, the mark of a true classic is that you can reread the book several times and always find it fresh. This is most certainly the case with The Trial. I always struggle with the question of K.'s innocence. The reader is told, unequivocally, that the Law is attracted to guilt. Is this an illustration of the unreasoning, monolithic madness that

so often surrounds totalitarian states, or is Kafka tellling

the reader indirectly that K. is guilty? I think most readers,
especially me, want to like and identify with the central
protagonist of a novel, but on this particular rereading
I noticed that K. is really a pretty nasty character. He is
arrogant beyond belief, selfish, treats women and most everyone
else as objects, and is even potentially violent. He alienates
and insults people who have the desire and the means to help him
navigate the formalities and uncertainties of his arrest and
trial. Or, is he an essentially decent fellow who, beset with
unrelenting frustration and anger at being accused and arrested
for a crime he didn't commit, decompensates into irrational
actions? Don't expect easy answers from Kafka. He is not going
to wrap everything up in a pretty bow, fully resolved, so that
you can feel good. It's a damned disturbing, sometimes bizarre,
and ultimately amazing novel. What is noteworthy is how
deceptively simple the construction of the plotline is. First,
the novel is short. Second, there are no parallel or
simultaneous plotlines occurring. There is only one plotline,
that of K. as he is initially arrested and subsequently tries to
make sense of what the charges are and how to deal with them. K.
is in every scene. There's no ,"meanwhile, back at the
courthouse, Inspector Smith was...". So the story, if this novel
can be said to contain a "story", moves along quite quickly.
Kafka's prose style is crisp and unadorned, as you might expect
from someone educated in business and law in early 1900's
Prague.And it's a good thing that he writes so clearly, because
the story itself contains not only some astonishingly bizarre
scenes (the flogging in the closet springs to mind) but dizzying
explanations of the procedures and logic of the court, the Law,
the judges, and lawyers. Imagine a writer like Tom Robbins, or
Don Delillo, with their hallucinogenic segues and refusal to bow
to consistency and logic, trying to pull off the "Lawyer"
or "Painter" sequences. It would be a soggy mess. But Kafka with
his precision and austerity makes it breathtaking.
It's funny, when my friends see me reading Kafka the initial response is almost always surprise and some variation of "Yuck!"
Of course, they haven't read him, but everyone "knows" that he is weird and dark and disturbed plus the book is old and doesn't probably even have a happy ending. Oh well, their loss.
I really want to take a class on Kafka, ideally focussing on the Trial. It is puzzling and unsettling and I'd love to hear other's thoughts on the symbolism and meaning contained in the book. In fact, if you're a Kafka scholar, or just someone who likes and has given some thought to this book, email me with your thoughts.
I unhesitatingly recommend this novel. It is important. It is certainly important to me.

ng

I giving the book 5 stars, because it's a really good read. Not having read any other translation, I must take other reviewer's word that it compares well. Read the other reviews, they are correct about this books quality.

Now, here's why I am mad. I read the introduction. Then I read the translator's notes. The translator is quite full of himself and his cleverness. Thus he points out the sections where he was particularly clever. In doing so, he gives away the plot, the ending of the novel, and why we should think about it the way he translated it, and not trust earlier transactions.

This should have been an afterward, not before the text. I reviewed the plot, including the ending, before reading the text. This somewhat ruined the experience for me. Skip the translator's notes, and you'll have a fine edition of Kafka's influntial novel.

When I first read this book 4 years ago, I thought it was the best book I have ever read. It had intrigued me like no other book. As a current freshman in college, I have read many books since (including Kafka's other classics The Castle and Amerika) and still, no book can capture me the way Kafka has in the Trial. The story of Joseph K. is a story for the ages. The complete confusion and naivety in Joseph K.'s life as well as his futile attempts to understand it pull the reader in and makes us look at things from his point of view. It is this ability that I love so much in Kafka. I have read The Trial many times, and each time I am just as entwined in the the confusion and suffering as the first time. A must read for any Kafka lover or any lover of literature for that matter. B.Nichols

If you are into existencialism or if you are worried about the meaning of your subjective life and the absurdity of the workings of modern society, this is a book you must read. Or maybe, if you read this though provoking masterpiece, you will start to think seriously about these issues and other aspects of the individual, and its daily relationship with society, bureaucracy and power.
This book was published poshumously in 1925 (Kafka died in 1924), and is considered by many philosophers and critics the best that he wrote.
The description of solitude and of the alienation of the modern human being is at the core of all Kafka's opus. We could consider that K. anticipated some recurrent themes of the existencialists. His detailed and realistic description of the human individual existence reveals its absurdity and irreality. From a metaphysical perspective, the absurd is based on the absence of God and the impossibility to understand anything that goes beyond rationality. From the social standpoint, it stems from the suffocating or controlling character of modern society. Struck by these complexities, the individual can only seek refuge in his small personal reality, renouncing reassuring answers and certainties.

I had read a lot of Kafka's short stories, but THE TRIAL was the first of his books I tackled. I just recently finished it, and I've been laying awake at night contemplating it ever since. If there's supposed to be any deep philosophical meaning to the book, I guess I just don't see it. I think Kafka writes about his own life and feelings in a symbolic way, and that's what the novel really is, a metaphor.
The novel starts out slow, the first hundred pages are kind of boring. But when the story's protagonist, K., starts really learning about the court he must fight his legal battle against, the novel gets intense. Of course, the more K. (and the reader) learn about the case, the more hopeless it seems.
THE TRIAL is like "1984" with the strangeness of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The court K. must face is supreme and untouchable, and the only way to avoid condemnation is to stay on the good side of the perverse, unjust, yet powerful judges. If you're able to put yourself in K.'s position while reading this book, you'll find it extremely frightening.
This book gets five stars because of how well it creates an engaging world where there is no hope of salvation, and that's the most terrifying thing ever.

I would not buy this book if it were your first forray into the realm of Kafka. But the short stories first, then Amerika, then the trial, and then, if you could make it through the trial, try this read.

The new translation is excellent (I've read both translations) and puts an even grimmer spin on life in the village of the castle.

Please note: Kafka died before finishing the book and he never really prepared it for publication. There are sentences that run half a page, and paragaphs that run almost a whole chapter. The final page ends mid sentence.

If you are a fan of Kafka then this book is a must read, especially if you read the Muir translation of The Castle.

The Castle is a powerful look at a town full of people trying to gain meaning for their lives from something outside of and wholy removed from their selves. The townspeoples alienation from each other and needy grasping toward a Castle that they can dream about but never touch is a disturbing one with strong parallels in today's celebrity worship, religious fundamentalism, and statism. Similiarly, K.'s descent from activism to conformity illustrates the power of mass society and the desire to fit in over the indivdual's need for a self-contained self.

The problem is the book is tooo long. Kafka induces a sense of futility and alienation by making his story move at a glacial pace with minute changes taking chapters to occur. And while this technique works, it's certainly not some great literary accomplishment.

So while The Castle is a relevant treatise on how we give, or fail to give, meaning to our lives; it's also an incredibly dense and difficult read.

Translation means everything! Over the years I've read much of Kafka especially during adolescence and into my early twenties when his worldview spoke most directly to my own attempts to understand how the world really worked. Of all his books only The Castle totally defeated me. I must have begun it five times in my life, only to abandon it partway through. Now I know why. It wasn't Kafka. It was the translation.

Mark Harmon's translation brought Kafka close to my ear and heart, the way he used to when I was younger. I could see the darkness of his interiors, feel the cold of his snow covered wind blown exteriors, smell the stale beer of the taproom, taste the small meals and strong coffee served, sense the animal []attractions of his characters. Most of all I could really hear the voices of his people as they simultaneously revealed and concealed themselves through their stories.

Sometimes I laughed out loud. Sometimes my hair stood on end at the dark realities which this book unveils. The Barnabas family stories in particular chilled me. Especially in this time of fear and shunning by powerful majorities of the 'others'in our societies and in the exhaustion of the 'cleansings' and genocides of the last century, the fall of that family made me feel like I was inside a hateful part of our past, present and future.

I've now lived part of my life within bureaucratic organizations, even as an 'official' and I understand as I couldn't as a youth how absolutely Kafka has gotten to the deepest truths about how our power structures work. What it's like to be enmeshed as part of them, and-or to be at their mercy. It is hard to find free space in the world.

I used to think Kafka was a genius and an artist of the highest rank. Now, reading him in an excellent translation I understand that he was also a prophet.