'The Castle' by Franz Kafka

This was another book I picked up and read because this month marks a significant anniversary. It was first published in April 1926, exactly 100 years ago. Interestingly, given that I had just read about part of Sylvia Plath’s work having been destroyed, this like all Kafka’s work did not suffer that similar fate which he had intended it should.

He wrote this in 1922 and abandoned it mid sentence, also at his death two years later apparently leaving various additional passages he had not yet integrated into the main narrative. In the edition I read, these are included too at the end. His friend Max Brod went on to publish all the work, ignoring Kafka’s request that the manuscripts should be destroyed.

In all honesty I found this to be a very tough and very turgid read. This is not just because it is unfinished and incomplete in terms of the additional fragments, but because I found it to be deeply tedious. Unlike Kafka’s far more concise ‘The Trial’ which I read last year, this extends over three hundred pages during which a lot happens but the story goes nowhere. I fully appreciate that this is the whole point, as a reader you are supposed to share the frustration the characters do when faced with interminable bureaucracy that stops anything of substance ever actually being achieved. But it does not make for an engaging reading experience.

The book, thankfully though is much lighter and much less bleak than ‘The Trial’, with comic characters and situations being included to make its points – some memorable grotesques etc. But I never really related to them or sympathised or cared for them.

I understand that this is widely seen as a modernist classic, a progenitor of the term ‘Kafkaesque’, a harbinger of later existential thinking and a highly original blend of the real and the fantastic etc etc. But frankly I found it to be very yawn-inducing. Not quite as bad as Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ that I struggled my way through couple of years ago, but still one to read if you are young with eons of reading time left ahead of you and primarily interested in the development of literature from an intellectual perspective. I think I will skip on Kafka from now on. I gave him my best shot.