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.

On "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver ***

 

The last book on my Black Panther reading list, it's the only one actually by a Black Panther, as it's the only such work that I could find that was written by someone involved in the organization at the time that the Panthers were actually at their most active. I was not sure how much I would enjoy the work; I suspected that it might grow tiresome in its argument. That was not the case at all, though the work, as the chapters progressed, did have diminishing returns. Cleaver is a magnificent writer. I can see why and how this work was published. The essays are dynamic, the language beautiful.

The work is divided into sections of essays. The first section is the most intriguing. It consists of a set of letters he wrote while in prison. One essay focuses on a standard day, which, as a man of good behavior, provides him with more privileges than may others. Still, he's cut off from reading certain works considered subversive, often simply because the warden has decided such, not because a work is particularly radical. It's a personal thing. While in prison, Malcolm X was killed. The manner in which this filters to the prisoners is interesting—first as rumor and then over time confirmed. Not having access to the outside world so much, Cleaver can live in denial for a few days, even though he is one of the first to learn of what happens.

Cleaver, it seems, was taken in by the Black Muslims as well. And by Garveyism. It's interesting to see these various ideas that I read about in other works and how they played out among an actual Black Panther, as such Panthers were in some ways less inclined to find the approach of civil rights activists like MLK useful. Still, in the later passages of the book, Cleaver doesn't seem as virulently opposed to such movements as Malcolm does in the early portions of his autobiography. Like Malcolm, though, Cleaver moves away from Elijah Muhammad and some of his views.

The second section deals with current events—boxing (i.e., Muhammad Ali's fights), Vietnam (how Black Americans seemed more likely to fight this war, which in Cleaver's view is mostly a white colonialist enterprise), and James Baldwin (a writer he finds to be very good but who also is too inclined to kowtow to white views for his own good).

A collection of love letters follows and then a section mostly focused on male-female relationships. Here, the work loses steam for me. There are some interesting observations regarding why black men are attracted to white women, and why white women are attracted to black men, and how these attractions stem from the power dynamics involved in enslavement—the idea of the forbidden, of having power, and so on—but mostly Cleaver just waxes lyrical in ways that didn't seem to convey much to me.

On "The Seven Churches of Asia" by A. Svoboda ***

This was not quite the book I was looking for, but being in the public domain, I took a gander at it. I was hoping for or expecting a sort of short history of the seven churches mentioned in Revelation, maybe a bit of discussion of culture of each community. Svoboda does supply that but really not much more than one could easily get from a short article on the subject or a Bible commentary. And with regard to the history, he usually provides everything from the founding to his contemporary day, so not much is focused on bibilical times. His focus, rather, is on archeology. There are lots of descriptions of buildings and of what remains of them. Indeed, what the book really reads like is a travel guide. It provides minimal cultural and historical detail and especially concentrates on the visual contemporary. Indeed, at the end of the book is an appendix with a run-down of how many days it would take to travel from one city to the other, with choices regarding which routes to take and suggestions regarding the best means to conduct one's trip. In that sense, it's an interesting artifact of its time. Svoboda suggests having bodyguards along some portions of the route, because of robbers, and even suggests speaking with specific knowledgeable people along the route. I don't think I'd have wanted to venture along such a route in the late 1800s, when Svoboda was writing.

On “Caesarea under Roman Rule” by Lee I. Levine ****

Levine sets out to do a difficult thing: write the history of a city during Roman times—the first four centuries CE. It's a difficult task because, as he notes, we lack records for much of that time. The early first century, with Josephus and the Bible, has a relatively large amount of material, albeit from just those few sources. But the end of the first century and the second are nearly a blank slate. The third and fourth are largely recorded by Eusebius, Origen, and the rabbinical records.

Founded—or rather, more or less re-created—by Herod from an earlier and much smaller settlement called Strato's Tower, the city was intended largely for the Hellenistic element of Herod's kingdom, in part to keep the portion of the Jewish element that hadn't supported his ascension in line. Despite the city's cosmopolitanism, Jews still ended up making up a good portion of the population. A sea town, it was a center also for trade, exporting the agricultural products of the hinterland and importing from places like Alexandria.

The Jewish rebellions led to a number of Jewish deaths and eventually to their being pushed out of the city—but not forever. (An influx of Roman soldiers made up for much of the depopulation.) By the third century, there was a significant Jewish community again, as well as communities adherent to pagan faiths, and Christianity. Surprisingly, Samaritans were the largest of the groups in the city at this time, though we have few records from them. The Jewish disfavor of the Samaritans grew as well, in part because they agreed to offer sacrifices for which Jews were exempt; in other words, to whatever degree Samaritans had been thought of as Jews, that came to an end during this time. Meanwhile, Christian academies found a home in the city, as it took on a more important place in the church than Jerusalem.