On "The Trial" by Franz Kafka ***

Reading this work had been a long time coming for me. I just never got around to it. It was not exactly what I was expecting. Oddly, I read The Castle years ago, even though this was the book I really always intended to read; that one, someone had suggested in terms of helping me with a story I was writing at the time. Maddeningly, of course, as with so much of Kafka's work, The Castle has no proper ending. The Trial, as it turns out, is missing pieces too, but it does have an end.

Having read both that other novel and his complete stories, I should have known that I would not find the work completely satisfying. True, some authors do manage to write one great piece that towers over everything else, and The Trial is apparently that for Kafka--but it did not seem so to me.

The story is about a man, Joseph K., who is accused of a crime. No one will tell him what the crime is. I guess I was expecting more of a courtroom and jail room novel, but oddly, the man accused is allowed to continue living his regular life, mostly. He does, toward the start, enter a courtroom one time, but never a jail cell, and as the book continues on, he never enters the court again, though his life becomes consumed in many ways by his case. I guess, really, this makes for more interesting reading than if he'd have been locked up in some cell for the whole novel.

Others hear of his being arrested and try to help. An uncle hires a lawyer for him. Various women spend time with him, talking about his case. Business clients set him up with others, including a painter, who gives Joseph K. some advice--namely that if he is innocent, he shouldn't worry, but then, contradictorily, notes that K. will never not be guilty in the eyes of the law and the best he can do is put off the verdict. Other people who have been accused offer advice, and at the end, even a priest, who tells a story about a man who is kept from advancing to another room by a gatekeeper but through persistence is eventually let past the door near the end of his life (when it no longer really matters). Much time is spent interpreting and reinterpreting this story in almost nonsensical fashion. Is the gatekeeper merciful? Cruel? The priest scene comes just before the end of the book, suggesting a kind of last rites being offered over Joseph K. In that sense, the book takes on the religious overtones I figured would make a greater part of the work, but Kafka doesn't make much of that tired trope. He skewers the legal system quite a bit, but not in a funny way. Mostly, it's just a sad theater of the absurd sort of book.

Perhaps, the best part of the work is the way that K. becomes, during the course of the events, more and more paranoid. He comes to think that others are looking to take his job, that some are spying on him, and so on. How could he not, after all, when so many know of his case and that he is awaiting trial. In that way, one gets a sense of how the court of public opinion works against a person even before being found guilty or not; in essence, it doesn't matter, which is the gist of K.'s experience.