Franz Kafka and Mark Harman's "The Castle"

MMG: Very good

India on Jul 01, 2023

Thomas Koshy: I love this book it's so vividly represented and all the situations are described in full really a pleasant experience to red this. Boosts my imagination.

India on Jun 24, 2023

John P. Jones III: … 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...

United States on Apr 03, 2017

Orson Welles: The notion that Harman’s translation corrects errors made by the Muirs is laughable nonsense. One need only look at the first paragraph of The Castle to see that Harman himself changes words from the German just as the Muirs do. Below, I compare the German to the translations of the Muirs, Harman, and the more recent translation by Anthea Bell. One may prefer one over the other. But all three are interpretations, not error free transliterations. Here is the German:

Das erste Kapitel
Es war spät abends, als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. Vom Schloßberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das große Schloß an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrücke, die von der Landstraße zum Dorf führte, und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor.

Here is the Muirs’ translation:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was [lag] in deep snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing up into the...

United States on Oct 21, 2015

Terry D: My contact prior with Kafka has, admittedly, been limited to  The Trial  and  A Country Doctor . Those books demonstrated that Kafka's writings involve many layers and, as each layer is peeled away, another layer is revealed, a layer that, at a psychological level, vastly expands and complicates the underlying story.

In `The Castle' the surveyor K, having been summoned to the village, struggles to understand the reason behind that summons and gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle.

Kafka died before finishing the novel and, shortly before his death, he told his friend Max Brod he was giving up on the book and would never return to it. He also told Max Brod that he intended K to die in the village and the castle would, on his deathbed, notify him that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there".

Despite Kafka's instructions that all his works were, on his death, to be destroyed `The Castle' was published (with a totally different ending) and is the story of an unresponsive bureaucracy plus K's futile attempt...

United Kingdom on Jul 11, 2015

Mr N D Willis: It's hard to put a finger on why The Castle is an enjoyable book. I suppose it must be the air of mystery surrounding the plot, characters and direction of the book. It's also hard to avoid comparisons with The Trial, which transmits a similar sense of mystery.

The story revolves around a character K, the omission of a further explanation of his contracted name is the first in a host of unexplained mysteries. We know very little about K, other than he has travelled to a town dominated by a Castle after being summoned to perform his duties as a surveyor. When K arrives at the town it becomes clear that nothing is going to be straightforward.

The town is run from the Castle by a mysterious administration whose labyrinthine rules and procedures govern the townspeople who are constantly in fear of offending those officials ranked higher than them while simultaneously striving to climb the ranking ladder. Unfortunately the whole game is rigged by a serious of secret networks, rules and unseen penalties.

Readers who enjoyed The Trial should enjoy The Castle. The same sense of menace looms over the narrative and its never clear if the main protagonist has figured out...

United Kingdom on Sep 17, 2014

Enobarbus: Kafka's Castle is like a sombre reworking of Dickens's Circumlocution Office. It is a bizarre existentialist tale where nothing is certain, least of all the status and character of the central protagonist, K. Everyone within the vicinity of the Castle suffers from obsessive trivia fixation and speaks with great energy to little purpose: it's bureaucracy as universal neurosis. Potential purchasers of these Naxos discs should be aware that this is not the familiar Willa and Edwin Muir translation but a new one by David Whiting. I've no idea how accurate the translation is but David Whiting is not always convincing: the English is sometimes wooden and unidiomatic, not simply stark but unimaginative and clumsy: at times, it sounds more like a crib rather than a convincing translation of a novel. Allan Corduner has a rich, clear speaking voice and makes a wonderful stab at rendering those interminable, self-contradictory monologues of which the book chiefly consists, compelling and coherent but he is no ventriloquist: there is very little characterisation in the various voices, many of whom sound rather like one another. I've just been listening to Anton Lesser's virtuoso reading of...

United Kingdom on Feb 11, 2013