[keiferski]

I somewhat dislike the line of Kafka commentary that focuses on The Trial and The Castle and then associates their bureaucratic themes with his own life experience working various office jobs.

One, because his writing is about much more than this theme (in which kafkesque is too frequently confused/mixed with Orwellian) but more because it pushes away his short stories and aphorisms, which I think are much, much better than his longer works – and more mystical and mysterious in nature. I'd take A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, or some of the aphorisms from the Zürau book over his more famous works any day.

It's unfortunate that writers tend to be known for a single "brand" which causes off-brand works to be pushed to the side.

This is all a long way of saying that if you associate Kafka entirely with insurance administrators and oppressive bureaucracies and don't find this compelling, check out his shorter works.

[farmeroy]

100% agree. I think it does so much disservice to his work. But I also don't think The Trial is primarily about bureaucratic themes either. To me it is much more about K not being able to understand the society he inhabits and the rules which govern it, and that can be extended to bureaucracy, but also obviously religion and morality, and just a blanket search for meaning.

I also have read both the original German der Process and the English translation, and I feel that, even though German is my second language, the original has so much more terror and humor than the English version, which largely reads like a bureaucratic text itself. Understanding that Kafka would laugh out loud while reading his texts to his friend, I like to imagine his works to be a kind of interwar Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I love to imagine Josef K as Larry David.

[bloak]

Kafka has a prose style that is relatively easy to read, because he tends to describe concrete things rather than abstractions and does not use many unusual words or idioms, but hard to translate because he exploits the relatively free word order of German to write elegantly structured long sentences that don't seem complex in German but can easily become complex in translation.

I read Der Process in German, but I have also looked at one of the English translations, probably the one by Idris Parry, and I didn't like it much: it seemed rough, old-fashioned and generally hard to read compared with the original, though it's partly a matter of personal taste. Wikipedia mentions six English translation of The Trial but presumably some of them are cheaper and more easily available than others so the probability that we both looked at the same English translation are greater than one in six!

[staamen]

I had not made the connection myself yet but having just finished the german version (the only one I read), I now can't unsee Josef K as Larry David, it fits perfectly. I was very surprised, given it's reputation, how funny the book was.

In the book it is also pointed out more than once that Josef K's trial is not held in the "regular" court. Which to me indicates that the convoluted nature of the trial doesn't necessarily reflect on all bureaucracies, even if it's tempting to interpret it like that.

[bena]

The other thing is that Josef K seems complicit in this process. At no point is he actively coerced into compliance. The system seems to not even care if he participates. I was constantly mentally screaming at the character, "Why the fuck are you doing this? You have a fucking choice."

So yeah, I think there's a degree of absurdity and irony in the works as well. Less, "look at this hellish version of reality" and more, "look at this dumbfuck going along with this".

[bloak]

That's right! He explicitly says at one point: "denn es ist ja nur ein Verfahren, wenn ich es als solches anerkenne" (for it is only a trial if I recognise it as such). Shortly afterwards he walks out, but the following week he comes to the same place at the same time without even having been summoned. What happens to him then in the roof space is bizarre and somewhat dreamlike but it's the following chapter, with the scene in the "Rumpelkammer" (junk room), that presents Josef K as definitely slipping into madness because he apparently sees and hears things that the "Diener" (clerks) do not see and hear. Josef K seems to have a problem more with society or some inner demon than with any real oppressive bureaucracy.

Perhaps all great writers don't fully understand what they write: a muse dictates to them or they're channelling their subconscious. But I find it particularly easy to imagine Kafka as an extreme case of that phenomenon.

He had plenty of time to finish and publish "The Trial" but he couldn't do it. I wrote above "the following chapter" but the manuscript (which Kafka wanted to be destroyed rather than published) consists of separate unnumbered parts so we don't know for sure what order they should go in.

[farmeroy]

To me, it's not even that he is complicit, because it's almost entirely his own doing as he actively makes decisions that lead to worse outcomes, refuses to listen to anyone's advice, and generally digs the hole deeper at every opportunity

[The_Colonel]

It makes sense if taken as a parable of life and humans seeking rules to live by, structure, meaning. It often doesn't make sense, is painful and confusing, but we still go with it.

[paulnpace]

Where does The Metamorphosis fall into this? That is what I initially knew him for.

[keiferski]

That's a good question and I think a good illustration of what I was getting at RE: the problems with branding a writer with a single theme. Because I don't think The Metamorphosis could really be described as "kafkesque" in the bewildering bureaucratic sense, and yet it is probably one of his better-known works.

[boringg]

I mean the metamorphosis describes being broken down into nothing over the life of you career. Sounds a lot like bureaucratic sense of kafkesque though maybe i need to revisit this.

[paulnpace]

I recommend the Stanley Corngold translation.