Wednesday 6 March 2019

Day 65- Kafka’s The Trial

How do i start again? When i had already written it once but it got deleted as my phone hanged for a while.

Well, i will tell you the whole story again. Two days back by chance i went to this book sale and bought few new books. One of them was Kafka’a The Trial, the book has his other stories as well so it was a bargain for me. So yesterday the whole day was spent reading him and some of it today as well.

I have been his fan for a long time, ever since by chance coincidence i read his ‘The Metamorphosis’. It was much later that i got to know that he inspired many latin american writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others towards a new form of literature (or whatever it is called) called ‘Magical Realism’. Marquez’s famous book ‘100 years of solitude’ was based on Magical Realism only. The idea for which he got from Metamorphosis. 

Coming to the trial. I gifted this book to someone sometime back but never got a chance to read it myself. So yesterday was the day. It started off very simple, like one morning Mr Joseph K. wakes up and he finds that his landlady has still not brought his breakfast which is unusual. The day starts of simple but it turns out to be his worst nightmares. It turns out that he is under arrest for some trial but he cannot be given the details of the trial. The story starts of from nothing and ends on nothing. The whole time i was waiting to see what the trial was all about and it is never revealed, not even at the end. At that point only i realized that it is a satire on the law, courts  and justice system. Mr. K. is wronged in this case, he is never told what the charges are and still he is going around lawyers, courts and judges to make some sense out of everything. The court is disguised like a secret police which is everywhere but no one knows what it is doing but once you get stuck in it, you will not come out unscathed. K. like many others is lost in this mess like people are lost in today’s justice system. People are made to run around for things around lawyers, courts and police, when most of it is mostly incomprehensible to them.

It was a great book. It said so much without saying much. It is a literary masterpiece. I have always been awed by his writing style which is so mysterious yet so simple. I always loved his other works as well but not his short stories. This might be because it is not easy to comprehend so much from such short stories or i am not capable of understanding them.


Anyways it was a day spent well, day spent reading Kafka.

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