The Trial - Franz Kafka

I was looking forward to The Trial because I'd never read anything by Kafka before. It seeemed like everything I would enjoy from a book - an M. C. Escher stairway design on the cover, a plot that inspired Pink Floyd's music video of the same name, and a dreamlike critique of overwhelming bureacracy. However, I was left disappointed, as most of the book is incredibly tedious to get through. I understand that this tedium is intentional to frustrate the reader, but Kafka does rather too frequently labour the point. The unfinished story begins with Joseph K awoken by some strange men in his room who tell him he is under arrest for a crime. We, along with Joseph (referred to hereafter as K), never discover what he is on trial for. In the following scenes, one immediately gets the sense of having walked into a surrealist painting, most notably one of Magritte's, for there are officious looking businessmen standing in corners of rooms, people watching from the windows of opposite houses, furniture re-arranged in improbable ways, and an overall collapse of reality. As K tries to uncover the mystery of his trial, he is drawn increasingly further into a nonsensical and convoluted web of dystopian surveillance and absurdity.

It's difficult to fairly rate a book that's unfinished, although this edition does come with some chapter fragments to give a loose idea of how it may have progressed. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, another unfinished novel I review here, this one at least has an ending chapter for some closure, so we're only missing middle chapters. Due to the loosely plotted and meandering narrative, their absence does not have too detrimental an effect on the overall story. What ruined the book for me were the extremely long esoteric and fake legal jargon explanations of how the law works in the world of The Trial. I did enjoy the bizarre erotic encounters that felt like they were straight out of a dream. I also appreciated the 'backrooms' style architecture, such as doors positioned behind beds, uncanny attics haunted by eccentric painters, and oppressive court office corridors populated by endlessly waiting defendants. In summary, the book is a philosophical examination and parody of the law's impenetrable system, mocking its labyrinthine pathways and seemingly arbitrary rules. Somehow, it feels simultaneously a shame and a relief that the book was never completed.

Rating: 2/5