Apologies for being a little quiet on here this week, I’ve been run off my feet but I’m back and I’ve finished another book from my mother’s collection. It’s The Trial by Franz Kafka and it’s a rather wild read. The first sentence - “Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.” was written in 1914 and the rest in 1915. It was published posthumously in 1925. The original manuscript was a bundle of loose pages arranged into chapters, not necessarily in the order the author intended, and was edited, after Kafka’s death, by his friend Max Brod who knew neither the correct order of the chapters nor which chapters were complete or unfinished.
It makes for a fever dream of a read which, rather serendipitously, neatly fits with the themes of the book: irrationality, lack of logic, chaos, alienation and a loss of control.
The plot follows Josef K, a man who is suddenly arrested and prosecuted for a crime that is never revealed. He is never informed of what he has done and is forbidden from seeing any details of his case. It’s an incredibly claustrophobic book, like being trapped inside a maze or trying to get through to a human when calling a bank. It’s maddening, thought provoking and uncomfortable and though the plot is weird and leaves you feeling disconcerted, it’s worth the effort for the ideas within it. It has a terrible and sudden ending but I suspect this is more down to the fact the novel is almost certainly not complete. I won’t ruin it by revealing it here.
Kafka was born in Prague into a middle class family. He trained as a lawyer and worked as a clerk in the Workers’ Accident Insurance Office, relegating writing to his spare time. At one point, he became a partner in the first asbestos factory in Prague. Despite having a job, he was a prolific writer but set fire to the vast majority of his work. Only seven books survived: three novels, a volume of short stories, his diary and two books of letters. In his will, he instructed Brod to destroy the novels The Trial, Amerika and The Castle but Brod ignored him and published the lot. He didn’t have much success in love: he was “tortured” by sexual desire (according to Brod), was an incessant womaniser and was haunted by sexual failure and a lifelong suspicion that people found him mentally and physically repulsive. He was engaged three times but never made it up the aisle.
He was prevented from joining up for military service in WWI, firstly because his employers arranged for a deferment and then because he developed tuberculosis. He would spend the rest of his life in various sanitoriums and the disease did for him in 1924.
The Trial has been adapted many times for the Stage, most notably by Steven Berkoff, it was adapted in 1982 for BBC Radio 4 and it’s been adapted for film twice: in 1962 by Orson Welles and in 1983 by Harold Pinter. The 1962 version starred Anthony Perkins (he of Psycho fame) as Josef K.
Perkins was an interesting character: he was arrested at Heathrow in 1984 for possession of marijuana and LSD and then again in Cardiff in 1989 for importing weed. After becoming an ordained minister he married Ken Russell and Vivian Jolly, he didn’t have sex with a woman until he was 39 and was supposed to be the voice of the Dentist on The Simpsons. He died before he could record the role. The part went to Hank Azaria instead.
Really short short story by Kafka (in full!) I posted earlier this month https://aboutmountains.substack.com/p/the-trip-into-the-mountains .
Kafka was the subject of a lesser known Alan Bennett play - 'Kafka's Dick' 🤔 I went to see a production with my school.