About the book
Josef K., chief clerk of a bank, is arrested on the morning he turns thirty by two agents of an unidentified agency, for a crime nobody names. He is left free to work, yet he is summoned to a court held in the attic of a run-down tenement, where he protests charges he still cannot learn. Franz Kafka's novel follows his efforts to clear himself inside an absurd legal bureaucracy that stays out of reach, and his growing isolation. Readers have taken it as a study of political power, a satire of bureaucracy and a religious parable. Kafka left it unfinished; after his death in 1924 his friend Max Brod edited the loose notebook pages for publication in 1925.
Halfway through the novel in 2018, Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson praised its exquisite prose and a narrator who seems to share the hero's own mind. He added that the idea of standing trial on unknown charges before a vast but petty bureaucracy draws on old social anxieties.
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This book has 1 recommendation
David Heinemeier Hansson (Co-Founder/Basecamp)
It’s a fascinating writing style with a 3rd party observer that’s treated as an extension of the protagonists own sentiments and mind. It’s also just exquisitely written. And the concept of being on trial for charges unknown by a vast, impersonal, yet petty, bureaucracy pulls from a timeless well of societal anxieties. So far, so very good. About half way through.
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