What do You think about The Castle (1998)?
I had the esteemed (and terrifying?) pleasure of reading this after having traveled to Prague. The landscape of Městská čast Praha 1, encompassing the Jewish quarter, Josefov, and the Prague Castle, illuminated this text tremndously; a perfectly example of mise en scene. Upon a return to Prague this past year, I couldn't shake many of these mortifying images from my head, even when confronted with the recent massive influx of tourists, which are, sadly, rapidly changing the dynamics of the city.I even had my own, unintentional, Kafkaesque experience, attempting to scale the hill to the Castle after too much absinthe. No, I didn't reach the Castle. Kafka: 1 - Cody: 0.
—Cody
If you're looking for aesthetic diversions while encamped at your parents' 250-acre rural farm for a summer of reading and writing before moving on to grad school for major leagues reading and writing activities, let me suggest dipping into the heavily annotated books at your local and increasingly religious small-town university for one hilarious joyride. Yes, writing in library books is tacky enough, but what if the marginalia attempts doggedly to make a case for the Castle, Kafka's emblem of hamstrung bureaucracy, as instead a manifestation of god, and all useless petitions to the Castle on behalf of K., the land-surveyor stymied by large-scale mismanagement, as unanswered but rapturous prayers? It's tempting to at first categorize this as a sadly limited scope for reading the work of a master, some problematic hiccup in the design of higher ed in the service of religious belief rather than some secular belief in knowledge, and maybe it's because I've read the book with this weird voice in my ear the whole time, but now I'm not certain that's the case. Or, most troubling of all, I can see a way for this note writer to make a good argument based on an analogy aligning the Castle with god as well as I can see a myopic and ultimately failed argument.There comes a point in grad school – and I'm assuming this is true across most of the English-related disciplines in which classes resemble American Gladiator-style combat over sets of books – when you realize that the brightest person in the room makes their arguments not always based on personal conviction but rather on perversity. This isn't devil's advocacy, really, but an exercise in applying their rhetorical acumen to increasingly difficult topics in order to demonstrate control, because if it's pulled off, the stance has the added benefit of making everybody else seem wrong and dull while the interlocutor looks dazzling, able to make connections nobody else is even aware of seem obvious. I won't claim to having been the brightest person in the class, but I have been guilty of employing this technique. Trust me, it works, but it's not very satisfying. Doubt is a successful technique for thinking, but it becomes overwhelmingly sad (yes, I mean feelings-wise) to spray doubt onto everything you encounter just for the sake of attempting to control it. I could doubt that the previous reader of Waynesburg University's copy of The Castle caught any overtones of sardonic critique of massively powerful governance, or I could doubt my own automatic assumption that a religious reading of Kafka is bound to distort the book in order to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. One of these is more interesting – and more generous.I mention all of this because rhetoric and apparent truthfulness are the object of nearly every interaction in The Castle. Doubt is the hellish and self-abnegating substance that makes for woe; it's possible to see K. and the others as subjects of exactly the kind of grad-school battle described above. The real question, for my money, is why they choose to stay in the village and endure it. If I were the one writing in the margins, I would have written "So just leave, then! Cripes!" as often as the ghost reader wrote "Night prayer! Aha!" during a fruitless ten-page-long discussion between K. and an undersecretary. Somehow, this makes a "god=the Castle" analogy a little more apt, if kind of radical for the educational institution this book was borrowed from. My final recommendation is that borrowed and with puzzling, theological side discourse is really the way, the only way to read this book. Two embattled thumbs up.
—Sarah Smith
I think my reaction to the ending was roughly, "What? Really? Damn it!"It ends in mid-sentence, and unlike Amerika, there's not a damn bit of closure. Most of the plot threads were left open, and it feels like most of the third act had been left undone.I guess I didn't understand the level of completion, The Trial and Amerika giving me a sense that it might be mostly done, with a few holes and missing pieces. Nope, it's a big damn tease. And insult to injury, it feels like the least well edited book of Kafka's writing. Entire chapters break the "show don't tell rule", feeling more like a summary than a proper chapter. It feels like they were written quickly, with great intensity, and never revised for flow or accessibility.And it's a shame, because there are some great ideas here. Previous books always gave off the impression that the protagonist was innocent, suffering at the hands of an unfair bureacracy. In contrast, K. is kind of a dick. He hits people when he gets impatient, he acts like a child when things don't go his way, and he's not above using people to get what he wants.It's a more mature statement on the concept of what's Kafkaesque. Bureacracies don't just fail because they're a bad idea. the failures of a bloated system come from the laziness, impatience, ineptitude, and arrogance of those involved. K is just as much a problem as everyone he encounters, and collectively they paint a picture of why bureaucracies fail. Too much corruption sends society screeching to a halt.But at times it's a pain to read. Conversations are often circuitous, several area contradict each other in ways that seem like a continuity error rather than clever writing. Multiple pages go by with one character going on a needless rant. On a structural level it's just broken.And it can never be fixed. The most any Kafka fan gets is those intense editions with all the scraps and original documents included, which seems like an elaborate form of self-abuse to wade through.I'm glad I've finished reading Kafka's major works, because damn it am I frustrated.
—Nicholas Karpuk
