Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Das Schloß... let’s get ready to ramble!, 14 Feb 2004
This is one of Kafka’s most impenetrable narrative constructs... a book that puts away with the stark storytelling and literary devises of the Trial and instead, broadens the more poetic aspects of the Metamorphosis - as well as drawing on his often fractured short story work - to create a surreal, allegorical parable that, in the words of another reviewer, offers everything and nothing simultaneously. The world of the novel in pure Kafka... with autocracy and bureaucracy pushed beyond their reasonable limits, infecting and affecting the characters in various ways and ultimately, creating an atmosphere of decay and paranoia that hangs constantly in the background, like a sick reminder of the character’s absurd futility.It’s bleak stuff, made bleaker by the writer’s use of descriptions and choice of subject matter. His work is categorised as being without colour, and certainly this is true when we read his work back. The world that is conjured in our imagination is like a combination of Lynch’s Eraserhead, Gilliam’s Brazil and Soderbegh’s own film of the writer’s life and work (which saw actor Jeremy Irons portraying both Kafka and his literary alter ego K. in a stunning example of self-reflexity). We can actually see the world in which the writer abandons us - leaving us without guidance or clues for the most part of the book - as a noirish underworld populated by a cavalcade of characters, each with shadowy-ulterior motives. The book takes in elements of black comedy and farce, which does, to an extent, lighten the mood... though the continual bombardment of surreal encounters, arcane descriptions and literary puzzles means that the humour is the last thing we respond to. As others have previously stated, this is a difficult book to get through on the first reading, requiring a great deal of concentration on the part of the reader to work through Kafka’s many multi-layered musings. Don’t despair however; this isn’t quite the bottomless pit that you might imagine it to be from my description. There is a great deal here to enjoy, it may just take a while for the writer’s world and characters to sink in. Needless to say, burgeoning Kafka fans will love it!
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"It's so hard to tell what's what, K.", 15 Oct 2005
In the era of New Labour doublespeak and the extension of the paraphernalia of the State at the expense of individual liberty, Kafka has never been more relevant. His world is a blackly comic nightmare in which the individual is oppressed by the sheer impenetrability of the bureaucratic state, where all our actions amount to no more than footprints in the snow, and are open to a multiplicity of contradictory interpretations, where nothing is at it seems - but is not as it doesn't seem either! A world where our best laid plans are constantly undermined and sidetracked by the mundane minutiae of daily life, a world of complex determinism which negates any notion of blame or responsibility, where the apparent exercise of our own free will at the expense of others can be excused on the grounds that we could have made no other choice. A world where the language of officialdom turns out to be meaningless - "Sir, you interpret the letter so thoroughly that in the end nothing is left of it but the signature on a piece of paper." It is a world that is at once absurd and yet recognisable to anyone who has had any prolonged dealings with government agencies. The mysterious bureaucracy that inhabits the castle could stand in for the CSA, Inland Revenue, Tax Credit offices, or any other agencies where the decisions of junior officials, themselves insignificant cogs in a Heath Robinson machine they themselves can't understand, are able to hold sway over the lives of those that have become dependent on their seemingly arbitrary decision-making processes - agencies who cannot admit the possibility of error even as they launch interminable investigations into that non-existent possibility, while floor to ceiling piles of files crash to the ground in a comic routine of haphazard officiousness.After another fruitless attempt to engage with the mysterious Klamm, K. refuses to be ushered away, "no longer in any hope of success, purely on principle." As the lights go out he is left feeling "as if all contact with him had been severed and he was now freer than ever before, no question about it, and might wait in this otherwise forbidden place for as long as he liked and had fought for and won this freedom as few others could have done ... but - this conviction was equally as strong - as if at the same time there was nothing more futile, nothing more desperate than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability." The novel remains unfinished - Kafka had directed that it should be destroyed on his death (he might have guessed this would be taken as a request to publish!) - yet one wonders how such a novel could have ever been 'finished', tailing of in mid-sentence seems entirely appropriate.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books I have read, 25 Sep 2001
By A Customer
Kafka's best work. This book is deaply disturbing to read. In fact it is very difficult to read because, being brought up with traditional narratives, we find ourselves yearning for sense and structure. These always seem to be appearing, but are always ellusive. This book could never have been finished and the problems could never have been resolved. It offers everything and gives nothing.I found that the book was a struggle, but that it gained more importance with further reflection and has stayed with me more than any other book I have read. Please read it.
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