The Trial: A New Translation of Franz Kafka's Restored Text

Megan: So, I don't have the historical/literary/etc background to understand all the ins and outs of Kafka's Trial, and I don't want it. I want to be able to appreciate the book on its own merits, to see what can be gleaned from it *without* looking up the equivalent of SparkNotes. Despite what literature professors will tell you, the value and power of a book is what *you* get out of it. What the author meant is a literary exercise best left for the classroom; never rely on someone spoon-feeding you what a book means. You have to decide for yourself if you hope to learn anything.

The Trial is disturbing once you've read the whole thing and rolled it around your mind for an hour or two. It can be a bit of a tough read (Kafka wasn't friends with paragraphs), but it's worth the effort.

First, we have our main character, Josef K. Josef is only referred to as K. throughout the whole novel, emphasizing how he's practically just a symbol in a multi-faced monster of a legal system. He wakes up one morning to discover he's been accused of committing a crime. We never find out what, how, who, or anything, and The Trial is all the more disturbing for it.

K. isn't arrested,...

United States on Oct 29, 2023

Mitchell: The language and dialogue is so powerful and well done. This story is vivid and dark. If only Kafka could see how loved he was in his lifetime... it's an all-time classic for a reason. 5/5

United States on May 31, 2023

Robert: This book never failed to leave me discombobulated whenever I sat down to read it, and I couldn't wait to see what was next. Unsettling, prophetic, strange and 'Kafkaesque' like I had heard about. Easy to read and a nice edition too, I'll definitely be reading it again.

United Kingdom on Jan 05, 2023

Kirill Khrestinin: I read Kafka’s Trial before and was quite confused by so strangely written book. Now I read it again, in the new translation that makes this book more deeper in understanding Kafka’s point.

This book is about a man whose one early morning found himself arrested. Kafka called this man Joseph K. And the surreal story of a bizarre theater begins. K. tries to figure out about his upcoming trial going into the rabbit hole confusing himself even more, disgusted with rooms he finds himself in and people who inhabit those rooms. K. mistake was, he tries find some sense in nonsensical things of bureaucracy where every single case goes for eternity never leaving a defendant alone in peace. He asks for answers receiving no comprehensible responses but ambiguous meanings of numerous bureaucrats who induced themselves with unlimited superiority.

The world around him seems crumbling while he’s on trial for the crime he didn’t commit. What was his crime? He’s not sure. Clerks in the court house on the other hand are very sure that K. commited a crime. To believe in justice you have to believe that the arrested man must be guilty of something otherwise the entire...

United States on Nov 17, 2022

GIANNI DE ANGELIS: Light reading

Canada on Nov 07, 2022

Enric G.: Fue un regalo.

Spain on May 15, 2022

Aran Joseph Canes: It’s well known that WWI begot the Lost Generation. Having seen their Romantic hopes pierced by the machine guns of the trenches, Westerners naturally turned to a more hedonistic approach to life.

And yet, humanity would plunge even further into the depths. WWII Germany was so barbaric, so satanic in pursuing the destruction of whole peoples, that survivors of the conflict had a very different reaction than their forebears.

It is precisely in this period that Kafka’s The Trial gained popularity in the West. Written in 1914 it tells of a man arrested, tried and executed who has no idea of what he is charged with. The courts run according to all the precepts of reason and modern bureaucracy with the single exception that the protagonist is innocent and the trial is absurd.

Kafka somehow was able to prophesy this proto-existentialist phenomena. The Trial bears the marks of what would become the Nazi state: all the parts of modern civilization are there but they are directed in an effort so unfathomably savage that the only response is to proclaim the world absurd.

More than any other pre-WWII author, Kafka describes this world and one of its principle...

United States on Mar 10, 2022

kuldeep multani: Like it

Canada on Aug 26, 2021

George MathewGeorge Mathew: Very good translation by Breon Mitchell. The product is exactly like what’s portrayed here. They could have improved the quality of the binding. Thanks Bookswagon.

India on Oct 15, 2020