The Trial: The Original 1925 Unabridged and Complete Edition (Franz Kafka Classics)
Written between 1914 and 1915, and released to the public a year after Kafka's death in 1925, this is one of those novels that burrows into your mind and refuses to leave quietly. It follows Josef K., an ordinary man who finds himself arrested, prosecuted, and condemned by some vast, faceless authority, without ever learning what he's supposed to have done. The reader is kept just as much in the dark. It's deliberately, brilliantly unsettling. Kafka openly admired Dostoevsky, citing the Russian's 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov' as profound influences, and even claimed a kind of spiritual kinship with him. You can feel that weight in every page. Like Kafka's other novels, 'The Castle' and 'Amerika', this one was never formally finished, though it does contain a closing chapter that ends things with a jolt that feels entirely intentional. After Kafka's death, his close friend and literary executor Max Brod prepared the manuscript for publication through Verlag Die Schmiede. The original handwritten pages are now held at the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, appeared in 1937. Its reputation has only grown since: 'Le Monde' placed it among its 100 Books of the Century in 1999, and it ranked second on a list of the finest German-language novels of the twentieth century. A strange, absorbing read that rewards patience.
- Author: Franz Kafka
- Publisher: Global Publishers
- Genre: Science Fiction
- ISBN: 978-1916700413
- Pages: 228 pages