Franz Kafka: The Castle (1926/1951)

Translation: Edwin and Willa Muir (chapters 1-18, 1930) and Eithne
Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (chapters 18-20, 1957)
Edition: Penguin, 1968 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 934

Kafka's unfinished novel, which has gained two and a half chapters not in the original published version due to the editorial work of Max Brod, inhabits a similar paranoid world to The Trial. It is not as forceful, the bureaucracy being less sinister and the tone more optimistic, but its frustrations are perhaps as a result more readily related to the reader's everyday life; in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first it can feel that life is a continual fight against the stupidity and immovability of officials.

The central character, K. - altered by Kafka from an originally first person narrative, arrives at an unnamed village. He has some kind of plan, which we never find out, other than it having something to do with the nearby castle, whose officials rule the village. (This makes him different from Joseph K. in The Trial, who of course has no choice in his involvement.) The first task he sets himself is to get the castle to acknowledge his existence, and this is really what the whole novel is about.

The Castle contains a good deal of humour, not something usually associated with Kafka, particularly slapstick in K.'s relationship with the "assistants" imposed upon him by the castle, whom he suspects - with good reason - of being spies. It's certainly the most relaxed of Kafka's works that I have read.

Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis and Other Stories (1916-1931)

Translation: Willa and Edwin Muir, 1933, 1949
Edition: Penguin, 1961 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 919

Kafka's most famous short story is one of the peaks of twentieth century fiction; in this collection, it is accompanied by others which explore related themes and were chosen as his best.

Metamorphosis itself is about the reaction of Gregor Samsa's family when he turns into a giant insect overnight; this is an allegory about how invalids are perceived and treated by those around them. The title is obviously a reference to Ovid's famous stories of the transformations of mortals and gods into animals and plants from Greek myth. The sick are no longer human; that is the point.

Investigations of a Dog and The Burrow continue the theme of illuminating human behaviour by reference to animals. The first consists of the thoughts of a dog philosopher speculating about the origin of the food which mysteriously appears when certain rituals are performed, and has clear theological overtones, while the latter is a study in paranoia.

Two of the remaining three stories are about bestial humans, antlike crowds in The Great Wall of China and inhuman torturers in The Penal Settlement. Thus the general theme of the stories (including the remaining one, The Giant Mole) is that people tend not to consistently live up to their best, perhaps a self-evident truism, but not one which a lot of literature would support; Kafka's writing is a counter to the heroic tradition.