The Trial
Book Excerpt
Then he was so startled by a shout to him from the other room that he struck his teeth against the glass. "The supervisor wants to see you!" a voice said. It was only the shout that startled him, this curt, abrupt, military shout, that he would not have expected from the policeman called Franz. In itself, he found the order very welcome. "At last!" he called back, locked the cupboard and, without delay, hurried into the next room. The two policemen were standing there and chased him back into his bedroom as if that were a matter of course. "What d'you think you're doing?" they cried. "Think you're going to see the supervisor dressed in just your shirt, do you? He'd see to it you got a right thumping, and us and all!" "Let go of me for God's sake!" called K., who had already been pushed back as far as his ward
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Of all Kafka's books this is clearly the greatest. Those who favor the current move to quasi-paternalistic big government may have difficulty discerning the warning of Kafka as expressed in "The Trial". However it is difficult to avoid the terror, confusion, insecurity and complete subjugation of humanity that the book presents. This is the real Catch 22, without humor or redemption.
The Trial presents a great author at his best, I implore you to read it. When I did so in my freshman year of college it changed my life. There is not much in literature that can truly say that.
And if you are in any way interested in the way Britain seems to be heading into a bureaucratic-manic state these days then you really have to read this prophetic book, because it is in many ways more prophetic than Orwell's 1984