The Castle

Even more nightmarish than I remembered. Just the most brutal perversion of the quest narrative. People — including the protagonist — are unknowable shells: "this not very savoury assistant [...] this puppet which sometimes gave one the impression of not being properly alive." And they get treated as such — I'd forgotten about the "interrogations" which form the background to K's wanderings through the back rooms of the inn. At the center of it all, voracious like a black hole, a kind of generator of negativity, is that unassuageable self-persecuting sense of inadequacy, of feeling oneself

someone who rode roughshod over everything, both over the law and over the most ordinary human consideration, with this callous indifference

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and sleepiness, someone who simply did not care that he was making the distribution of the files almost impossible and damaging the reputation of the house and who brought about something that had never happened before, that the gentlemen, driven to desperation, had begun to defend themselves, and, after an overcoming of their own feelings unimaginable for ordinary people, had reached for the bell and called for help to expel this person on whom nothing else could make any impression!

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This world is surreal, claustrophobic, irrational, paranoid, absurd, sinister, and darkly funny. The writing was sublime at times. Reading the dialogues was like trying to find my way in an underground labyrinth, and then emerging in unexpected places.

This book also seemed to do very strange things to my brain and my perception of reality. It was a shame, and it was a relief, when it ended in mid-sentence (it could have gone on forever).

Whether you read one of Kafka's diaries, short stories, or this, the final of his three novels, it's a singular experience. Even though it is incomplete, it offers you a taste of the absurdities of the contemporary world as perceived by the author. What does it all mean? The book's portrayal of bureaucracy and how it can be used to understand the contemporary capitalist economy was the main focus of my most recent reading. Even though I may disagree with the author's viewpoint, he nevertheless captures some of the annoyances of people who believed they could not survive in the world of his novel.

The Castle by Franz Kafka is a challenging yet incredibly fulfilling book. It provides a chilling and unforgettable voyage into a world where show more the quest for understanding and acceptance is thwarted by a wall of bureaucracy and elusive power. It is a work that is still analyzed, discussed, and ultimately disturbs and fascinates readers with its stark depiction of the human condition in the face of overwhelming and incomprehensible systems. Its incompleteness only heightens its enigmatic power. It is a difficult but necessary read for anyone interested in modernist literature and the ageless issues of alienation, power, and meaning-seeking. show less

Do you remember the story of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet following the trail of a woozle? They think the woozles are multiplying because their own footprints are multiplying as they circle the tree? The absurdity of following your own footprints without conclusion - that is exactly what reading The Castle is like. K. is a land surveyor who thinks he has been hired to do a job for the Castle only for some inane reason he cannot gain entry. Barriers abound everywhere. How can he measure and estimate if he cannot visit this very important castle? K. is literally thwarted at every turn. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how many schemes he concocts, he never does any surveying for anyone. On a deeper level, it seems Kafka is trying to show more tell us K. abandons his home for a quest for meaning.
Beside the strangeness of K.'s insistence to do a job he obviously wasn't hired for, there are other bizarre moments: K. randomly throwing snowballs at people or calling both assistants by the same name because he cannot tell them apart (and why does he need assistants when he can't do the job in the first place?). All of a sudden he is engaged to Herr Klamm's lover, Frieda. They are given classrooms as a place to live as they are hired to take care of the school and vegetable garden, only they have to vacate the room if a class is in session. Of course a class is going to be in session and heaven forbid K. is left alone with the cat! So many absurdities that I'm back to the analogy of Pooh and Piglet.
As an aside, listen to a song by Josh Ritter called "The Torch Committee". In the lyrics, Josh lists rules and regulations that are reminiscent of the hoops K. must go through in order to gain entry to the castle. If K. is not dealing with the Control Official or Department A, he is negotiating with Town Council or the Superintendent or the Mayor. show less

This is a bit heartbreaking, or rather, a lot heartbreaking, but 'so it goes' said a great author. It's heartbreaking because I know the words will fail me me here as they've failed so many others and even Kafka too...though unlike most, maybe even unlike nearly all, Kafka mastered that failure even while being crushed by it to deliver a kind of literature that stands so far and away on its own that, basically, it's transcendent.

The Castle is unfinished, longwinded, confusing, boring, and deep, dark, and heavy. But it's also funny, suffused with the best kind of melancholy one could ever hope to find in the greatest literature. And, despite its themes of alienation and general disenfranchisement, it's a novel with a beating heart and show more blood that runs, it is one of the most human novels you will ever read. It teases you mercilessly as it baits you with philosophical twists and sleights of hand regarding people and what they do, why they do it, and what, if any, meaning can be derived from all of that. It drags you through its labyrinths and almost like a literary case of chasing the dragon, the higher the high you seek the deeper you have to go and the darker the places become surrounding you, but you can't stop, at least I couldn't.

Suffice it to say, this isn't easy reading, at all. But The Castle, along with the rest of Kafka's oeuvre is necessary, and in fact, to me, mandatory if one wishes to get a better understanding of the nuanced psyche, the artistic psyche, and its struggles with both the world around it and the world within it as well. Like no one before and no one after, Kafka existed and still exists as the lonely child turned man of the great divide between continued attempt and eternal failure. The most alienating and cold, angry at his impotence, yet somehow the most warm and touching of the great writers, knowing that it's in that world and this life of pointlessness and meaninglessness, that the truest words are written and the deepest meaning is unearthed. Meaning derived on this world and within these pages to match the incandescence of the stars above. show less

The only reason I was able to make it through The Castle is because I was listening to the audio version but that does not diminish how amazing it is. The prose alone should warrant five stars. The way that Kafka winds and cakes bureaucracy and misdirection is like the ring master of some dread circus. It was wonderful to work to—wonderful to be immersed in.

I thought that I was the kind of person who hated plots that didn't resolve themselves, that went nowhere, characters besot by unending hardship but I found myself able to relax into this novel with its constant failures and lack of forward motion. It gets to a point where one has a grasp of what Kafka is doing and can just sit back and watch the web weave and unweave.

I loved it show more and am glad I was able to experience every word that we have of it. Pity it wasn't completed, the world would have probably imploded from the amount of reflexivity and double-think crammed within one beautiful text. show less

This is my third time in my life, at least, reading this - and the portrayal of a Sisyphean existence becomes more real and less surreal each time. It feels like a perfect parable of modernity's bureaucracy (the banality of bureaucracy) and regulation. I almost dread liking it -- it would be like "liking" a Holocaust documentary. This is the world we live in, sad and beautiful, engaging and pointless.